


Instalments

by junkshopdisco



Category: One Direction (Band), Radio 1 RPF
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Intimidation, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, References to Drugs, Sex Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 15:01:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 49,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/914610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junkshopdisco/pseuds/junkshopdisco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry falls in love with a wealthy client. They both pay for it, in instalments. <i>Pretty Woman</i> AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Instalments

**Author's Note:**

> Much love and endless thanks to my Motley Crue alba17, alby_mangroves & ourspacesongs for making sure this happened and sucked less than it would've had I been left to my own devices ♥. [Soundtrack](http://8tracks.com/junkshopdisco/instalments) / alby_mangroves drew me [this Harry](http://archiveofourown.org/works/911938). Go tell her she's amazing ♥.

_Did you ever meet someone, really meet someone? Not flirt, not fuck, not brush past their life on your way to someone and somewhere else, actually meet them, like, head on?_

_It’s this feeling like every bit of you – your past and your dreams and your cells – has been introduced._

_Don’t notice it at the time. You piece it together after, when it’s too late to say, “We just met, let’s not stop, yeah? Let’s actually get to know each other.”_

_You meet, you realise, and you pay. And you do it all in instalments._

*

“Someone’s scratched the c off the Canal Street sign again. You think it’s one of us who keeps doing it as a territorial claim?”

“For all I know, Harry, it’s the guy who sleeps under the archway with the three-legged labrador.” Hand still in his pocket, Niall points at the shifty middle-aged virgin on the towpath, who’s – as ever – encased in a mint-coloured cagoule and can’t muster the nerve to come over and ask how much. “Or your biggest fan.”

Harry elbows Niall in admonishment, sniggering anyway. 

Niall turns and walks backwards down the path, spreading his hands at the worn denim sky to feel the drizzle tickle his palms. “Lovely night for it, anyway.”

The first night he said that, Harry had just rocked up at the train station with everything he owned in a bag. He shook out his hair as he fed a tenner into a vending machine, the Twix he wanted never materialising and a punch of the buttons returning nothing but an ERR message. 

Harry muttered, “Shit, what?” at the glass, and Niall laughed that laugh of his that’s open and bright like starlight. 

“It’s a bitch of a thing, that,” he said, offering Harry a swill of vodka. “Lovely night for it, though, eh?” 

Rain bounced up off the glass webbed-roof and his jumper was more hole than wool, but he seemed to mean it. Harry wondered what your life looks like if lovely is that, so he sat on the bench and twirled the cord of his holdall around and around his hand while Niall talked, swallowed his nerves down with gulps of booze. Later, when they were the only creatures there but the pigeons and the night guard, Niall traded Harry a spot on his sofa for a really nice kiss in the dark. 

Since then, Harry’s filed the serial numbers off the kid who bought a train ticket to Manchester to prove a point. Sometimes he wonders what would’ve happened if Niall hadn’t, whether he’d have sulked the night away over a Twix and slunk home or if he’d still have ended up here, the two of them working different spots and eyeing each other with disdain.

Instead he eyes the shadows, ticking the regulars off a register: Zayn, Liam, Louis – 

“Where’s Matt?”

“Did you not hear?” Niall pulls the zip of his hoodie up and bites at the collar. “Went missing Thursday. This morning his neighbours are telling the papers he was a good lad and it’s a crying shame, that they can’t understand why anyone’d hurt him. His mother’s distraught. Maybe if she’d given a fuck before he was in a body bag he’d – ” 

“Oh.” 

Harry swallows. Of course it happens. He and Zayn joked about it once, how the police and press would leave out their occupation and paint them as a promising this or that. Zayn had gone for ‘street artist’ with a draw on his fag and a sarcastic lip curl as he tagged the bus stop with a marker; Harry had done a bad impression of his business teacher saying he had the makings of a gifted entrepreneur. They all know any one of them could end up recycled: cans and bottles out every second Wednesday, prostitutes week after that. 

He eyes the clutch of men staggering down the steps at the bridge. They’re off their faces even though it’s barely eight. They’ll be a stag night, football team, or work outing, daring each other to do some skinny rent boy in the arse while the others watch, shiny suits and insults chaffing equally against whoever’s dumb or desperate enough to let them get him alone in the dark. Niall edges closer, but the guys fall onto the towpath and barrel under the bridge. The crowd down there can look after themselves. 

“Thought I’d head into town,” Harry says, releasing his fists, waiting for the sting to die out of the half-moons left on his palms. “There’s some fashion thing on. Come with me? Make more money picking the lonely ones up in bars.”

“Make more money when I can pretend to be underage. Besides – ” Niall glances off down the towpath, waves at Simon, where he’s leaning against the brick and checking a watch that cost more than either of them will see this year. “ – I’m expected. Owe him for the party the other night. Don’t make a face. Was only a couple of grams and I spilled most of it.” Niall shrugs, not meeting Harry’s eye, correctly guessing there’s an expression of displeasure going on there. “I got the two hundred I owe him in my pocket to keep him sweet – ”

“Tell me you didn’t take the emergency money out of the fridge?”

“I’ll have it back by the end of the week.” At Harry’s huff, Niall looks up from under his rain-straggled hair. “Aw, don’t be mad. Could be charging you double what I do to stay.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “Just trying to – ”

“Niall!”

At Simon’s call, Niall turns like a puppy to its master, nervous energy in his spine and his smile edgy and forced. 

Just like that, all Harry wants to do is drag him back to their flat, cuddle him on the sofa and tell him he doesn’t care about the money, just wants Niall to whisper into his hair the stories his gran used to tell him about seals that were really part-time people. 

Instead, he says, “Be careful. Those guys from before were trouble and – ”

“I have done this before, you know. Lads’ll look out for me.” At Harry’s sceptical eyebrow raise, Niall ducks his chin into his top. “All right, I promise to check their nails ‘cos god forbid I let anyone who hasn’t had a manicure fuck me.” 

“Serial killers have shitty cuticles, Niall. Saw it on _CSI_. And text me the reg if you’re getting in a Beemer. They’re the most likely to get violent.” 

“That’s bullshit.”

“Its true! I read – ”

“It was on Wikipedia for fourteen minutes. You probably put it there yourself and forgot.”

Harry laughs and kicks at the ground. There’s a new hole in his trainer; stripy sock poking through like a worm. “Still.” 

“You’re worse than my mum,” Niall mutters.

They both know Harry’s not. 

He pulls Niall in by his hoodie and kisses him, filling his mouth with the taste of the Sugar Puffs he had for breakfast-slash-dinner. 

Niall smiles as he sinks back on his heels, gaze falling down the knitted mesh of Harry’s jumper and the t-shirt with a guy with his dick out. “You look obscene,” he says. “Go bag yourself someone rich and bored. Rent needs paying.”

Harry turns and walks away with a purposeful wiggle of his skinny jeaned arse, Niall shouting, “Call me if you get unlucky,” after him in the dark.

*

Harry’s usual haunt turns out to be a bust – private fashion party he can’t get into – and the next three bars are packed with braying execs in suits too ill-fitting to put them in the income bracket he’s looking for. What he needs is someone older and generous, someone who’ll see him as a treat or a pick-me-up, maybe someone who’s had a row with their significant whatever who’ll go at it quick and dirty and leave him a tip to take the edge off their guilt.

He dodges a bus and heads to a place with a mixed crowd. Palm readers move between the tables under swathes of orange fabric that cascade from the ceiling like a Bedouin tent. It’s just exotic enough to put a person in the mood to take a risk but not so much they’ll suspect what he’s up to before they’ve decided they want it; perfect. 

A circuit reveals it’s as he thought: influx of Londoners in new season haute couture mingle, eying each other, and he meets the gaze of a man – all silver hair, fitted tweed and wedding ring he’s fiddling with as if it’s burning – but he just sniffs at Harry down his nose and goes back to boring his intern. Squeezing past a group of middle managers crowing about the collapse of a high street chain, he spots a thirty something woman with Prada glasses, vampiric lip stain, and a slit to the thigh in her skirt. She meets his gaze, gives him a quick once over, smiling a little, but there’s a drink next to hers on the table. Harry loiters to see if a guy will come out of the bogs and claim it or if she’s here with a pal, chewing on his lips as he does the maths in his head – two of them, might want to make a night of it, take him to dinner to toy with him, work up an appetite. Probably four or five hundred in it if he plays it right. He leans on the wall, keeps his eyes on her until she looks before letting his lashes fall as if he’s coy about being caught.

She crosses her legs, hitching the split higher. 

Flashing her half a grin, Harry pushes off the wall, but before he gets there, a grey haired woman with a scarf holding up her throat sinks onto the banquette, reaching for the menu. Too old to be her mate – mother, probably. Or boss. Either way not exactly what he was looking for. Prada glasses cocks her head, apologetic. 

Harry mouths, “Damn,” and grins, playing nice because he might see her around and good first impressions go a long way to a swift and pain-free sale. 

Before he’s secured himself another target, one of the palm readers touches his elbow. 

“Tell your fortune, pet?” she says. Her eyes have curls drawn into their corners, but the accent takes the mysticism down a notch. 

He holds his hand out, palm up, and her fingertips trickle down the middle. 

“You’re looking for love, aren’t you?”

“Gonna find it?”

She looks up, mouth refusing to close. He wonders if she does that when she comes.

In another world where sex was something he did just for fun he’d have her knickers off and her back against a wall in ten minutes, but his stomach growls, reminding him of the shelf in the fridge where even the margarine tub stuffed with fivers for a rainy day is empty thanks to fucking Simon. 

“See you later?” Harry says, and leaves her with a smile as he goes to the bar. Maybe if he doesn’t meet anyone she’ll at least take him home. He’s not beyond suggesting, ‘Hey you know what’d be fun? Eating Nutella off your stomach,’ as a way to take the edge off, although the time he thought Marmite might be an acceptable substitute is something he’s not keen to repeat. 

He orders a whiskey and ginger – god, there’s so little in his wallet he’s going to have to make it last – and sits on a stool in the corner, trying not to stare at the cherry he asked for the way cartoon dogs look at steak. 

His drink is warm against his love line by the time the next likely candidate walks in: tall, flowery shirt, subtle dark blue suit; bracelets jangling as he rearranges his hair and makes it more erratic than it was before. He checks his phone as if he might be meeting someone but pushes it back into his pocket with a sigh and calls the barman over. He orders without looking at the menu – two of something and the fancy nachos – his voice not that of the London interloper Harry expected but as Northern as his. He takes a seat and tugs at his cuff while the barman makes him two orange things with a twist of green rising up from crushed ice in a delicate spiral.

“Look like you need this.”

“Don’t I always? My mother says I’ve the eye bags of a boozehound and Decleor don’t make a cream for that. I’ve checked, more than once.”

The barman laughs; the guy pays. It’s a shame he’s expecting someone because rich, witty, and cocktail-medicating for misery is exactly Harry’s target market. 

He looks around for someone else. Short and balding in the corner meets his eye and smiles, something slippery about it as if his lips are sliding away from his teeth. His watch says he’s definitely got the money but yeah mate, not that desperate yet, ta.

Flowery shirt knocks his drink back, eyes crinkling up as the ice hits his teeth. He slides the glass away and reaches for the second, poking at it with his stirrer as his gaze wanders, passing over Harry’s face, stopping, coming back. 

Huh. Promising.

Harry fishes the cherry out of the mostly melted ice in his glass, holding it by the stem. In a practised move, he drapes it down onto his tongue, but just when he’s about to wrap it up in a suggestive furl, the guy’s phone goes. Instead of looking on with slack-jawed want, he sighs and thumbs through the message, leaving Harry no choice but to spit the cherry out and start again or eat the thing.

He opts for the latter, picking the stone out of his mouth just as the guy swigs at his drink and properly looks over, catching Harry right in the eyes. Disarming is what it is: hazel irises, heavily lidded, long lashed, freckles all the way to his hair. 

Harry thumbs the corner of his mouth, just letting his tongue peek out to nudge the pad, smiles a little as if he too hates when people message when he’s out. See? We’re the same. And oh, just casually thinking about blowing you, no big deal. 

The guy lifts an eyebrow. His gaze falls off Harry’s chin, rolls down his chest, almost prickling the hair on Harry’s thigh as it passes over his crotch. 

Harry shifts in his seat, letting his legs part.

The guy rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and sniffs a laugh.

Harry sighs and drops the cherry stone into his glass. “Great. Juuust great. Will I ever learn to be cool?” 

The guy looks back at him. 

What the hell. Harry smiles, giving him his last ditch effort, like it’s 3am, they’ve drunk themselves sober, and neither of them has got off with who they wanted. 

Resignation pits the guy’s cheek as he returns it, but he raises his glass, shaking it in invitation, little finger out. 

Pinching his lips together so he doesn’t punch the air like he’s on a football terrace, Harry slides off his stool. He takes his drink with him, even though its nothing but weak whiskey slush, setting it on the bar as he hops up, brushing just close enough to bump their arms. “Hi. Your suit is sick.”

“What happened to you, get lost on your way to Manto?” 

The guy gestures to Harry’s jumper. Or maybe his t-shirt. Hard to say. 

“What’s that?”

The guy tilts his head, stumped for just a second. “Club. Everyone’s a name like Reece, wears a crop top, and the DJ thinks acid house is still happening.”

“Oh. Haven’t been there. We could go, though, if you want? I like to dance. Like to dance with you, I reckon.”

The laugh takes Harry by surprise, but it’s a nice one so he joins in with it, pokes at his glass and watches the ice make a tide around the cherry stone. 

“Pass on that, thanks. Having a bad enough day without some twink in a Vivien Westwood knock off trampling all over my toes.”

Curling his foot around the strut of his barstool, Harry whines, “Hey. Not a knock off. Found it in a charity shop.” Switching his face from sulky to flirty, he adds, “How ‘bout if I promised to keep all contact strictly knees up?”

“Be an odd looking dance, that, but maybe we’d start a craze. Be a club thing at first then go mainstream and in a year there’ll be a bastardised version on a workout DVD claiming to do amazing things for your core.”

Harry sniggers and sneaks a look while he drinks. There’s a tattoo peeking from the guy’s sleeve: old, sailor style, in a spot that must’ve hurt. Interesting. Not a lawyer or in finance, except if he’s one of the fashion crowd, perhaps. There’s something slightly sad about his expression that makes Harry think maybe he’s a journalist here to do interviews, back in an old stomping ground full of regrets, or maybe he just ran out on a lover – a model whom he manages – someone he’s waiting on an apology call from. Harry line-draws him a flat high above the city and a significant whoever padding across the floor in a towel, chews his lip, plotting his course of attack: heavy flirting, boost his ego/mend his heart, seems like he’ll be able to keep up.

“Can I get you a refresher?” the barman says, setting a plate of nachos down with a clink.

The guy waves at the bar, meeting Harry’s eye. “What you having, then?”

“Whiskey and ginger?” The smell of melted cheese rises from the plate, curls its fingers around Harry’s stomach and squeezes. “With a cherry, please.”

“That and another of these, then, ta.” 

The barman nods and swipes the squat glass out from under Harry’s fingers. Harry reaches for the guy’s drink and lifts it, giving it a quick sniff before winding the cuffs of his jumper down over his hands so he doesn’t snatch a nacho. “Saffron gin? Nice.”

“How’d you know it was – ?”

Harry doesn’t tell him drink knowledge is a great conversation starter in nearly every scenario. “Get a good one it should taste like swallowing liquid sunshine.”

“I only order it ‘cos it’s pretty.”

“Well you’d want something that matches your eyes.” 

The guy sniff-laughs, leans back, like, _you for real?_

“Next time, try it with orange peel,” Harry says. “Brings out the flavour better than lime.”

The guy pays for the drinks the barman delivers, passing Harry’s down the bar to him with a smile. “So there’s some flavouring purpose in that cherry, then?”

“Nah,” Harry says, fishing it out by the stem and watching whiskey drip off it. “Just like them because they’re fun to have in your mouth.”

He makes sure the guy’s looking this time and lays the cherry on his tongue, removing it from the stalk with a pop, curling it back into his mouth. He holds it for a moment before nudging it against his cheek, pulling it back, doing it again. 

The guy rearranges his hair, pulling it up from his scalp before settling his elbow on the bar. “What’s your name, porn star?”

“I’m not bothered what you call me.”

“But what’s your name?”

At once he’s warm, insistent, inquisitive. Harry spits the cherry stone into his hand, unable to remember any of the names he normally uses. Boyce, he thinks, just say your name is Boyce, but then he can’t work out if that’s actually a name or just a collection of sounds and the guy seems like the type who’d spot that. “Harry.”

“You want a nacho, Harry? They look like they could use a good time.” 

Unable to think of anything else to do with it, Harry tucks the stone against the condoms and lube in his back pocket and reaches for a nacho. The guy waits until Harry’s got a mouthful of sharp cheese and sour cream before he adds, “How much for you to show them one?”

The nacho almost lodges in Harry’s throat. Even if people think they know what he’s up to, they never usually have the balls to just come out and ask. Shit. Maybe he’s a policeman. Harry meets his eye, trying to see arrest warrants in there. He pictures the phone call to Niall from the cells. Double shit, there’s no money in the emergency tub. Triple shit, Louis, Zayn, and Liam just blew everything they earned in a month on tattoos. Niall’ll have to call his mother, ‘Hi I’m a friend of Harry’s, would you happen to have enough money for his bail? What was he doing? Misunderstanding with a gentleman from the vice squad. All a bit George Michael, you know how it is.’

The guy takes a nacho and dunks it in the salsa, movement revealing the lining of his jacket and the label, Yves Saint Laurent. Right, moron. Not a policeman. Not in that suit. 

“Depends what they want?”

“Take them somewhere quieter and suck them off.”

“Seventy,” Harry says, before looking him up and down adding, “five,” for the stress.

Raising an eyebrow, the guy sucks guacamole off his thumb, pulling off with a smirk when he sees Harry shift on his chair. 

“And for the whole night? I’d expect to be treated very nicely.”

Harry opens his mouth but only air comes out. A guy’s never asked for that before and it flashes before him like a GCSE Maths puzzle:

If I usually charge a woman £500 and she expects me to flirt with her, eat her out, fuck her twice before I leave, but he’ll presumably be doing the fucking, what percentage of my usual price applies? Or should I charge more because he didn’t flinch at £75 for a blowjob when you can get a pretty decent one for a fiver half a mile away?

“You got a pen?”

Pulse racing as the guy fishes in his breast pocket, Harry tugs the napkin out from under the plate. He takes the pen – it’s metal, warm from sitting snug against the guy’s body – and does a quick sum (blowjob X 2 + fuck, low effort), scribbling it out because fuck it, he’s wearing YSL, it’s not a puzzle. Charge what you think he can afford. Writing £750, he folds the napkin, sliding it across the bar, flimsy paper caught under the tip of his finger. 

The guy reaches for it before it’s properly arrived and they touch. Harry draws away slowly, watching as he takes the napkin and flips it open. Another eyebrow lift and the quirk of his mouth makes a divot just above the corner. “Pricey.”

Harry takes the paper back and draws a line through the number. He looks up and there’s something in the guy’s eyes that makes him write £1000 instead of £695.

He pushes the napkin slowly back across the shiny metal and watches as the guy reads. 

A brief sniff and he’s folding the napkin up and running the back of his nail along the crease. “I don’t think you’ve quite got the hang of how negotiating works, Harry.” 

“I’m doing all right.” Harry wets his lips, going with his gut. “Add another two hundred and you get the full boyfriend package.”

“What’s that when it’s at home?”

“We meet in a bar,” Harry says. “I dress up nice for you, kiss you on the cheek and pretend to be really interested in your day. I ask all about the dickhead in your office – ”

“How’d you know there’s a dickhead in my office?”

“There’s a dickhead in everybody’s office.” The guy shakes his head but he’s amused. “I coo and pat you on the knee while you talk.” Harry drags the back of his knuckles over the guy’s knee and a little way up his thigh, turning to fit his palm to his rather spindly leg. “We have a few drinks – go to dinner if you want – and then I lean in – ” Harry does, close enough to feel the prickle of hair against his nose. He squeezes and draws in a spiralling whiff of vanilla and spices from his neck where a dab of cologne has sat all day. “ – and tell you to take me back to yours and I’ll make you forget all about it. And I will. Do anything you want.”

He lingers just long enough to breathe out over the guy’s ear, watches his shoulders stiffen in reaction, and sinks back on his stool, reaching for a nacho because if this goes south at least his stomach’s happier. 

“You stay all night, spoon, stroke my hair, all that shit?” 

The sarcasm in his tone is the kind that means Harry can’t tell who the derision is aimed at. He swallows sour cream and salsa and reaches for another nacho. They’re really nice. 

“Even make you breakfast, if you want.” He pauses to eat the nacho, lets his lips linger over his own finger. It gets the reaction he wants – eyes fixed – so he scoops up some stray cheese and hollows his cheeks as he sucks it off the tip. “You want pictures or me to send you flowers at work to thank you for an amazing night, that’s extra.”

The guy leans back, and Harry can’t read his expression, whether he’s horrified or impressed. A glance at his dick calls it: interested. “You do that for a lot of blokes?”

“Women, usually. Buy me for each other as a gift. I’m quite popular for hen nights and – er – divorces.”

The dimple is back. “Very modern of you. But I already got the bar part for free and breakfast’s included where I’m staying, so – ”

He shifts as if he’s going to leave and Harry panics and reaches for his sleeve. “Eleven? I’ll do it for eleven hundred.”

The guy settles, one shoulder dropping as he considers Harry with a smirk. “Grand fifty plus breakfast in bed. They do a fancy Continental with mini pastries and I’ll order you a newspaper.” 

“In French?”

“If you want.”

“Done.”

Tongue flickering out as he wasn’t quite expecting that, the guy laughs, short and breathy. He extends his hand, says:

“Right, then. You’re on.”

His palm’s really big against Harry’s; Harry pictures them on his hips and feels it in his dick. Or maybe it’s not his hands: maybe it’s the thought of him paying in cash and being able to do that thing people do on _Come Dine With Me_ where they chuck the notes up into the air.

“I’m Nick.” Relinquishing his grip, Nick lifts his glass, waiting for Harry to lift his too so he can clink against it. “Chin chin,” he says, and knocks his gin back. 

Harry settles a toe against the back of his own leg and curls it up, watches the barman funnel ice into glasses. He’s going to buy new trainers and maybe a coat that actually keeps the rain out and if Niall keeps his word about putting the fridge money back, there’ll be enough left over when he’s paid the rent for a train ticket out of here. Stomach fisting up to protect the idea, Harry fingers the sharp edge of a nacho and then eats it, chasing it with a sip of whiskey.

“How’d you normally do it, then?” Nick says. “The money stuff.”

“Cash or transfer’s fine. Either way it’s sixty per cent up front. I’ve PayPal if that’s – ” 

Nick smiles and reaches for his phone, scrolling to his own contact details and offering them over. “Bill me for the lot and I’ll pay now,” he says. “I don’t like owing people. Makes me edgy.”

Opening his app, Harry adds Nick’s details and sends the request. While it processes, he shifts closer, scoops up some salsa and guacamole and offers the nacho out. 

“Oh, now you’re on the clock, I get the full service?” 

“Yep.” 

“Go on, then,” Nick says, leaning on his hand like he’s bored but opening his mouth anyway. 

Harry moves in so close he can see the splay of his eyelashes and feeds the mess between his lips, watching as Nick bites around it. 

“Fanks,” Nick mutters, utterly nonchalant. 

Until he chews.

He sits up so fast Harry has to flail out a hand and catch hold of the bar to stay on his stool. “What’s – ”

Covering his mouth with the back of his wrist, Nick coughs, and reaches for Harry’s glass. He gulps at it, letting out another breathy cough, reddening from nose to temple. “Holy hellfire, d’you dig a whacking great chunk of jalapeno out on purpose?”

Harry laughs, and then he’s not sure that’s really very nice, so he makes a contrite face and mutters, “It’s a promise I’ll be hot stuff?”

“Oh, he’s a comedian. Perfect.” 

“Don’t be sour. Cream?” Harry dips his finger in it and offers it over.

Nick grits his teeth, shakes his head, muffled sounds coming out that probably started as ‘not bloody likely’. 

It’s desperately unsexy – something of the force-feeding a toddler about it – so to make up for it, Harry sticks his finger into his mouth, giving it a long, hard suck, rolling it along his tongue and pulling off with a slurp. He looks at his handiwork: Nick doing an amalgamation of grimace and smile as if he’s having the same toddler thought but appreciates the effort. He switches to awkwardly playing with the bracelets caught around his wrist, but at least he’s not cancelling the transaction.

Harry’s phone lights up with a message:

> _Payment completed: Nicholas Grimshaw credited your account with £1050._
> 
> _Total balance: £1057.50_

Biting his lip, Harry closes it and thumbs out a quick text to Niall:

> _Don’t expect me til tmrw. Rent covered .x_

He pockets his phone and looks up to where Nick’s brow’s puckered with a hint of uncertainty. “All right?”

Harry wonders why he didn’t barter harder if he was worried he wouldn’t have enough in his account. He tries to think of something to say, like a shop assistant would for someone who’d just offered up their credit card for a giant plasma TV before revealing they’re now bankrupt. Unfortunately he’s never worked in one of those kind of shops and all his training for this has been on the job, the usual men he attracts more the kind to give him £100 – well, £80, £50 on a bad night – and a whiff of popper, then bury his face in the graffiti of a wall. He eyes the toilet, wondering if he might be able to nip in there and call Niall for advice, but Niall thinks it’s amazing Harry can even get that for his _scrawny nothingy thing of an arse_ so he’d probably just laugh about it being Monopoly money.

Of its own accord, Harry’s knuckle has strayed to his mouth. Noting Nick watching, he bites it, moves it back and forth against the wetness of his lip until Nick’s eying him with amused speculation.

“You want to take me back to wherever, now?” Harry says, low and quiet, meeting Nick’s eye with his best suggestive smile.

Nick swallows, but the words that come out are: “No rush. You didn’t ask about my shitty day yet and it’s got shittier – someone’s monstered their way through my nachos.” 

“Sorry, er – ” Harry grabs for the menu. Shit, when will those funds clear? “I’ll get you a rep – ”

“Hey, no, it’s – ” Nick goes to touch Harry’s arm, stops above, hand hovering just below his elbow. 

His fingers flex and clench and Harry wonders what he’s waiting for before realising it’s him, Nick’s waiting for him to say it’s ok to touch.

Harry nods, and Nick’s fingers settle, uncertainty giving it purpose, now. It tickles Harry behind the knees and below his bellybutton all at once. 

“Was just a joke,” Nick says, fingers doing this squeezy brush thing that’s actually kind of nice.

“Oh.”

Harry leans into him to cover a rush of embarrassment, Nick’s hand drifting down towards his wrist. 

“Here,” Nick says, taking the menu and flapping it open on the bar, skimming it. “What you fancy?”

“Not fussy.” 

“If I get chips with truffle mayo, will you eat half of them? I’ve got a fashion thing on Wednesday and I can do without looking like a heffer in a room full of toothpicks.” 

Harry smiles a yes, shifting his foot from the strut of his stool to the back of Nick’s ankle as he folds the menu back up. 

Smiling just barely, Nick waves the barman over. “Same again or you want a cocktail? Hear the Tom Collins they do here is unreal.”

*

The hotel’s façade is red brick, one of those buildings that sit like a grand dame on the corner of two streets. The downstairs is a display window mannequined by a waiter in a white jacket and a guy in sunglasses sipping Champagne, the bar lit up all subtle in pale yellow so passers-by can see: you got to be someone who’s someone to make it through the door. Which – incidentally – is glass and gold and Harry’s not entirely sure it’s metal plated rather than the real thing.

“Tosser. Sunglasses indoors is bad enough but ordering that just so people can see you drink it? Newsflash: you’ve got money, no one cares.” Leaning into the cabbie, Nick shoves a twenty through the window. “Keep the change. Have a good night.”

Harry feels a bit ridiculous for having thought Nick might be worried about his finances. He fiddles with a hole in his jumper while he stumbles onto the pavement, Nick closing the door behind him.

“Yeah, thanks,” Harry says, but the cab’s already pulling off. 

He shivers at a rush of night through the mesh of his top and Nick beckons him towards the steps, arm around his shoulder, fingers rubbing to warm him up as he steers him inside.

Beyond the door, an expanse of shiny parquet leads to a huge marble reception desk that rises up like an altar to lilies. 

“Holy fuck.” 

Harry snaps his hand up to cover his mouth but it’s too late – Nick heard it and so did the woman behind the desk, although with her hair pulled back corset-tight, at least she can’t make the full horrified expression her eyes indicate she’d like to. 

“Pleasant evening, Mr Grimshaw?” she says, fishing under the desk for a key card, sliding it across the marble with a shove of manicured beige in a judgemental _scchhhhh_. 

Nick takes the card with a smile and a, “Very, thanks. Could I order a copy of _Le Monde_ for the morning? It’ll help my friend learn to mind his French.” 

“Hahaha.” 

Harry trails his fingers over the smooth curve of the marble, trying to feel the lines, draws them along to where the wallpaper brushes his skin more like fabric than paper. He whips out his phone and takes a picture for Niall and the others, adds the caption: _bit of a dump._

He’s just clicked ‘share’ when Nick grabs him by the jumper and tugs him towards the lift. 

The doors ping open and Harry gets a good look at his own expression of surprise in the floor to ceiling mirror. He turns his back on himself, biting at his thumb and trying to keep off his face what he’s thinking: shit, this guy is loaded.

Nick hits the button for the top floor and Harry leans into his arm, going to snuggle his neck to try and work on a tip, getting a glance of warning for his trouble. He’s unlike Harry’s usual tricks: hasn’t tried to justify his actions with a sob story about a partner who’s lost interest in sex or shown off his watch to prove there’s nothing he can’t buy, hasn’t tried to cop a feel even though Harry wormed a foot up his leg and dawdled his fingers on his knee. 

Bit disappointing, if he’s honest. God, what if he can’t get it up?

The lift spews them out. Harry expects a corridor of identikit doors – familiar if fancier territory – but instead it’s a lounge with a plasma screen announcing _Welcome Mr Grimshaw & guest_. On the coffee table there’s a greengrocer’s worth of fruit in a basket that has the look of being woven by hipster artisans and every newspaper and magazine there is to buy laid out in a fan. Beyond that, there’s another desk where a bloke in a prim grey morning coat and stubble stands, hands folded like a schoolmarm beneath a sign that says _Concierge Service_. 

“Good evening gentlemen,” he says, in one of those jovial, plummy voices that have no obvious geographical root, “anything I can get for you?” He looks at them both as if it doesn’t matter one of them’s just _& guest_. His gaze strays down to the dick on Harry’s shirt but it doesn’t put a dent in his expression of placid decorum. “Night cap, perhaps?”

Nick squeezes Harry’s elbow and leans into his ear to stage whisper. “Ben makes the most wicked hot toddies in the world.”

“I’m good, thanks. Have anything else I might be sick.”

Amused disappointment in him flits across Nick’s face, but it’s gone when he smiles at Ben. “We’ll just turn in, then.”

Ben nods and comes out from behind the desk to take the key card, leading them down a short hall that’s all fresh white paint and no discernable finger marks. With a flourish, he swipes through the locking mechanism and lets them in, tucking the card into a cradle on the wall. 

So rich he doesn’t even open his own doors. Jesus, Harry should’ve started the bidding at two grand. 

The room – suite, Harry guesses is the word – makes the lobby look like an intern threw it together. It’s calm, green and white, heavy wooden doors leading off a vast sitting room, at the other end of which the city lights twinkle beyond layers of net and a jut of black wrought balcony. He stumbles over the rug to stare up through a huge panelled skylight, where the moon peers in on an L shaped sofa that’s probably been positioned for an entire posse to lounge on while they stargaze. 

He’s still staring up at it when Ben says goodnight and ducks out, Nick sliding the chain into place behind him. 

“How much does it cost to stay here?” Harry says, clinging to the sofa, pressing the cushions – which are softer than all of his clothes – into his palms, looking up having made him a bit giddy.

“I’ve no idea.”

Nick scratches at the back of his head, glancing at the bedroom. It has one of those beds right out of _Gossip Girl_ , like a socialite should be lounging on the pillows in front of the bare brick and being dismissive to a party planner. Shit. Nick’s _that_ rich. He’s Serena Vanderwhatsit rich. 

Harry can’t get his trainers off fast enough. He kicks them out of the way and rushes over hips first, hooking a finger through the buttons on Nick’s shirt to pull him in. Nick goes with it, frowning as they collide, and Harry thinks this really isn’t a frowning situation and slides a hand down over Nick’s stomach to his dick. It’s on its way up, even though Nick’s gaze is squirrelling everywhere and his hands stay where they are. 

He looks like he’s having some kind of crisis, actually. Harry needs to get this moving pronto – at least, like, get past the point where the guy can ask for a refund, so he maps the outline of his cock with his palm. It’s decent in size, so at least it’s not a small or malfunctioning dick crisis. Thank god because a) that’s Harry’s least favourite sort because he’s not much of an actor and a moan of _so big, so good_ is really tricky to pull off when he can barely feel it, and b) that Serena bed was not made for a man in a flowery shirt to sit on, head in hands, while a hooker whispers, ‘No, it’s fine, we can just talk’. It deserves, frankly, to be fucked on: bouncily, messily, fucked on, before one party gives the other £100 in cash as a thanks for the memory. He slips both his hands up to Nick’s shoulders, lining of his jacket slippery and warm as Harry slides it from his frame. 

“Be a shame to crease it,” he says, and folds it neatly over the back of the sofa, tugging his jumper up over his head to toss it onto the cushions like the jacket’s lap dog.

Shaking out his hair and offering Nick what he hopes is a _Jesus just fuck me, ideally against that headboard_ smile, he inches back into Nick’s space, going for his dick again. 

This time, Nick’s eyes flutter closed as Harry runs his fingertips down his shaft to get a good hold on it. He thickens up a bit, a tiny breath popping on his lips, and Harry thinks maybe he’s just one of those guilt-ridden Catholics who need a moment to hail Mary like a cab or whatever inside his own head. With one hand he squeezes and coaxes him the rest of the way up, palming his own dick with the other to make the most of the middling arousal that’s sitting under his zip just from proximity to another guy with a hard-on. 

“There. That’s better.” He inches up onto his toes to plant a kiss on Nick’s cheek and whisper, “What do you want?”

“What can I have?”

“Anything you want, babe.” Harry lets the word sit against the shell of his ear before pressing his lips just under his lobe, mostly as an excuse to grind into his hip so Nick can feel he’s not the only one who’s hard. Half the battle with the reluctant ones is letting them know he’s into it; the rest he usually conquers just taking his clothes off. “Kiss you anywhere but on the mouth.” 

Licking Nick’s neck to make the point, Harry fiddles with the first button on Nick’s shirt, gets that, the next one and the next one open, just enough chest exposed to scratch at the hair there. Nick’s breathing shallows and Harry chases it, drops little kisses all the way down his neck to where he can catch a glint of metal from his necklace on his tongue. 

“Just let me know if you’re going to do anything kinky.”

Nick laughs – breathy – but at least it makes some of the tension fall out of his body. 

“Think I’m into that?”

Harry looks up to meet his eye with an _I don’t know, it’s ok if you are_ , undoes the fastening on his trousers and pulls his flowery shirt free, just slipping inside to work over his cock where it nudges at the fly. He draws his knuckles back up Nick’s bare stomach, watching to see what he likes, kissing his chin, his jaw, 18 hour stubble rough under his tongue. He moves back to Nick’s ear to whisper, “Going to feel so good. Can’t wait to get your gorgeous dick in my mouth.”

“You can leave off that for a start.”

Pulling back, Harry tilts his head in question. 

“ ‘My, my what a big cock you have’ and all that – ” Finally Nick moves, undoing his cufflinks so the sleeves hang free. “Not really my thing.”

“I can talk about other things? Pretend I’m a virgin, pretend you’re the only – ” 

Nick’s smile as he pockets the little nuggets of silver is both mocking and charming and it’s the latter that gets under Harry’s skin like a grain of sand.

“Fine. No frills?” 

Harry reaches for the neck of his t-shirt and hauls it over his head, dropping to his knees and casting it aside at the same time. Nick’s eyes traverse his body, mapping the tattoos that litter his skin, but Harry’s not in the mood to be admired. He takes Nick’s hand, inspects his fingernails – they’re annoyingly perfect ovals and smooth, like he has actually had a manicure – drops them, and with a sharp tug of his hips, Nick’s dick bumps against his nose. Harry mouths at his trousers in purposefully porny lip pinches, leaving a damp patch with his tongue right over the head, running his nose down to nuzzle at his balls. He grabs the elastic of Nick’s boxers and snatches it free of his dick, not exactly gentle, but the lack of reaction of the _oh so hot_ kind is starting to piss him off, especially when he was doing his best to look sincerely into it. He tugs Nick’s boxers and trousers down to his ankles in one move – well, four if he’s being honest but goddamn, his knees are awkward and, like, _everywhere_. 

Nick steps out of his pants and Harry shoves them behind him somewhere while he angles his head to kiss a path up Nick’s dick. He fills his mouth with it, softening his jaw and inching it in deeper than he’d usually go without getting it properly wet first. He looks up, like, _see?_ But as always when he thinks he’s made a point, he forgets what it was as soon as he feels like he’s won.

He pulls off, working through his own spit with his fist, holding Nick’s dick up while he presses his tongue into the creased skin where Nick’s balls meet. He licks up the shaft and across the head before taking him in his mouth again, humming to get Nick’s attention because he’s not a big fan of being ignored.

Nick does look – briefly – one hand flexing open. Harry nestles towards it as far as he can without giving him too harsh a scrape of teeth. Nick gets the idea and settles his fingers in his hair. Harry closes his eyes in approximation of a nod and tightens his lips, drawing free on a proper cheek-hollowing suck and getting the very head just rest between his lips on his tongue. He runs a hand up the back of Nick’s leg to encourage him to just get on with it and fuck his mouth but Nick jerks – not into his mouth like a normal person would but out, head of his cock skidding across Harry’s cheek. 

“Ticklish.”

His breath is gone but he doesn’t shove back in right away, moves just a bit to nudge at Harry’s cheek. Oh, okay. Harry lets his tongue go slack, chasing Nick's dick, letting it bump off his lips, the corner of his mouth, and chin, before guiding it back onto his tongue. He slides it across the wetness there, tilting, tongue barely licking, makes a show of closing around it, slowly working down to meet his fingers. 

Nick clings to his hair, slightest tremor in his thigh. 

Harry murmurs happily as he moves back and forth, letting it slip free, taking his time until his jaw aches, his chin is slippery, and all he can taste is metal, lips tingling until he can barely feel them. 

Next time Harry takes him properly in, Nick guides his head until Harry’s up close and personal with his pubes. It’s been a while since he actually gagged on a dick but he’s half a mind to fake it just to serve Nick right for being some kind of robot. 

He retreats and Nick doesn’t stop him, so he slips down his dick with little kisses and licks, nuzzles against his balls, fisting his shirt as leverage as he ducks down and takes one in his mouth, getting it wet before breathing on it just lightly. 

“Jes – ” 

Harry takes him all the way in again without much warning, swallowing around him so hard Nick tips his head back and swears. He slides back up, holding him steady with one hand while he circles his tongue around the crown. With just the tip he finds the spot underneath that drives him insane, flicking against it before going back to a slow orbit, working his other hand up and down.

“God almighty.” 

Harry pulls off with more of a slurp than he intended, pearl of spit working its way along the string between mouth and foreskin. He wipes his chin with the back of his hand, fumbles in his back pocket for a condom, tearing it open with his teeth, rolling it onto Nick’s cock with a combination of fingers and mouth. He gives the tip a quick kiss and gets up, covering his slight stagger by jerking Nick off. He wipes the dry latex taste away with a kiss to his chest, coming up to nuzzle the inside of his open collar. 

He smells nice, at least, like an old fashioned sweet shop. Harry sucks noisily at his neck, waiting to see if Nick’ll push him back onto his knees and tell him to finish the job or what. Instead, Nick’s arm wraps around his waist, fingers pushing down under his waistband. Harry’s jeans are too tight for them to get very far so he pops the button, zipper grating as it eases down. Nick gathers up his bum against his palms. His hands cover most of it and Harry nestles into him, breathing soft and quiet against the base of his throat, trying to make out the figure on the pendant nestling just where his eyes lose their ability to focus. 

Lifting him onto his toes, Nick pays his arse plenty of attention, leaning into him to get his fingers into the crease. Harry’s just thinking _definitely going to get fucked, then_ , when Nick makes a startled cluck noise in his throat, his fingers slipping on lube.

“Considerate.”

“Professional.” 

Nick’s breathing goes thick and dull. Retracting his hand he turns Harry so fast he’d lose his balance if Nick weren’t holding him against his dick to grind into the fleshiest part of his arse. “I hadn’t forgotten.”

The words are warm and harsh on his ear and Harry reaches back for him, working his fingers up into his hair. He shifts against his cock. “Take what you paid for, then.”

The nip on his shoulder guides Harry to where Nick wants him – a glass dining table that looks like it’s floating up off the floor in front of the window, lights of the city like pinpricks of starlight as he pushes Harry down onto the top. 

Chill hits him from stomach to nipple, own dick caught beneath him. Breathing in sharp, Harry flattens his palms, turning to rest his cheek and look back. 

Nick eyes him as if he’s trying to read something on his skin. Harry could answer all the questions gushing through his head but he’s not really in the mood to be gracious; in fact he’s in the mood to be a bit of a dick so he just stays there, smirking, knowing he could make the moment easier with, “Oh, I want you so bad. Fuck me, please, hard, I like it hard.”

Dampening his lips, Nick draws a rushed, prim line of kisses up Harry’s spine, squeezing his dick as he steps in. The bony bit of his ankle knocks against Harry’s and he touches the waistband of Harry’s jeans. Harry gets bored of waiting for him to tug them down and works his boxers and jeans low enough to expose his arse. It’s not the most comfortable, fabric tugging on the head of his dick as it tries to find freedom, but it makes a pretty picture and if he’s reading this right, it’s not like he’ll be here for long.

He watches his breath fog the glass as Nick lines up and nudges in, keeping it steady, a pool that ebbs and flows under his own command, nothing to do with whoever’s on top of him, working their way inside. Still caught, his own cock softens in response to the stretch and he grips the floor with his toes until Nick’s half way inside, focuses on relaxing until he can feel the juts of hips against the flesh of his arse. Nick waits, and annoyance fires through Harry. It’s not like he’s some kid who needs careful treatment and kindness; he’d prefer it if Nick made his face skid across the glass, gave him something other than the drag to think about, babbled angry and filthy on the back of his neck while digging his self-loathing into his skin with his fingernails. Instead there’s stillness, in which Harry feels his pulse everywhere – or maybe it’s Nick’s vibrating out from the big vein in his dick. Either way, disconcerting. Scrambling for the edge of the table for leverage, he pushes back, closing his eyes to really feel it, trying to goad him. 

Nick’s hand on his hip almost surprises him, it’s so light; he pulls almost all the way out, breath catching, and he traces the curve of Harry’s bum, easing his cheeks apart.

Curiosity piercing his annoyance or whatever it was, Harry opens his eyes and watches him. He’s good at getting what people want when they don’t know how to ask for it, but Nick hasn’t given much away, unless you count going on for ten minutes abut how much he hates green olives because however old he gets, his brain has never quite learned not to expect the taste of grapes even on top of a pizza where they’d be wildly out of place. Maybe Harry was on the money with the boyfriend thing: he’s trying to be a gent, worried he’s been too rough and Harry’ll never want to see him again. No, not quite. The way Nick’s holding him, watching the way he disappears as he slides back in – 

_You like a show_ , Harry thinks. Makes a change at least from the guilty husbands Harry’s had in toilets or the shifty fuckers who’ve pressed him into the walls and won’t even look at him, like if they don’t get him naked enough to see their dick in him it doesn’t count. 

On the next thrust, Harry tries a moan, turning his face until it’s almost under his own shoulder so Nick can see the way his lips twitch en route to a truncated smile as he moves. The next thrust is more purposeful, the one after that’s better still, then Nick’s actually fucking him, hand fastening over Harry’s shoulder to keep his rhythm. 

Harry breathes against the glass, necklace clinking, pooling, clinking until Nick’s movements slow and lengthen. He shivers as Nick’s hand slides down his spine to his waist and now he’s let up a bit, Harry moves in shallow circles against him, chasing the feeling, opening up around him. A sharper thrust that stays deep, a flicker of silk from Nick’s shirt cuff at the base of his spine, and Harry hisses, pressure on his limp dick a little too much. He pushes on his hands and straightens up. Nick’s chin bumps on his shoulder. Closer than he thought. Rolling his hips, Harry looks at him. He’s pleasingly sweaty and his hair’s everywhere. He wraps an arm around Harry, bringing him the rest of the way up. Harry’s palm squeaks on the glass, the lube squelches at the change in angle, and if they knew each other at all they’d probably laugh. As it is they avoid each other’s eyes and pretend they didn’t hear it, and Nick buries his face in Harry’s hair and moves as fast as standing most of the way up allows, thighs and arse wobbling with the effort. 

Harry wonders if housekeeping will be able to tell from the particular smears they’ve left on the table what went on in here, if Nick’s the type who’ll meticulously scour the room clean of any evidence or not give a fuck. He likes the latter option, lets out a little sigh at the thought, and Nick kisses the back of his neck, open and wet. He’s not expecting Nick to touch his dick but he does, fumbling for it in the loose sag of his half-off shorts, touching him through the cotton. 

“Better?” 

Swallowing, Harry pushes the front his boxers down to get his cock out properly and guides Nick’s hand to it in case he hasn’t realised he’s allowed. “Better.”

Harry shifts his feet until the angle’s better too, groans and goes with it when he feels the familiar prickle of arousal as his dick stirs back up to properly interested under Nick’s easy strokes. Him liking it isn’t the point but Nick likes that he likes it: breath on his shoulder getting more ragged as Harry whimpers, even if he doesn’t let out much noise in response. Maybe he’s just playing the part of the dutiful lover; maybe it takes away the guilt if Harry has fun too. “Good at that,” he mutters.

“Beginner’s luck.”

Harry laughs, it cutting off as Nick gets the rhythm of fucking him into his hand just right. Clinging to the edge of the table as he picks the pace back up, Harry wonders what it’d be like to live here or somewhere like this, with someone like Nick who never has to ask how much anything costs, whose socks never have holes in and who doesn’t have to worry about the lack of food in the fridge because he can always order in or go out, to fuck on a table just for the novelty of having a different surface under your skin. 

In the window he can see them, fragmented versions of them strewn across the pane, moving in this juddering dance of hip and hand as Nick strokes up over his stomach and then down to his dick again. They actually look like lovers if he turns his head, especially when Nick kisses his ear, his cheek, gets as far as the corner of his mouth before he thinks better of it, remembers they’re not, and snaps Harry forward onto his forearms. 

Biting his lip against the shock to his elbow, Harry gives as good as he gets, gritting his teeth to move back, back, back in hard counter thrusts, clenching to help Nick along. He wonders if it’s possible to get glass burn; he’s had carpet and rug and even fake grass make scabs of his skin and it’d be a new addition to his collection. He screws his face up with effort, digging his fingernails into his palm. His own dick’s heavy and tight but he listens to Nick’s breathing, altering his timing to make it quicken and quicken and then disappear. There. He wonders what Nick’s picturing as he comes, if there’s someone else’s head on his body right now, or if it’s this that’s actually getting him off. 

Nick's fingers tighten on Harry’s arse, turning trembling as he slows and stops, body going so noddley he has to prop himself on the table with both hands.

Harry always wants to laugh in this moment. He’s not sure if it’s relief, or that everyone sounds ridiculous letting orgasm noises out of their mouth. Either way he restricts it to a smile and stares at the table, where he’s reflected as blobs of shadow. Weird to be able to see the carpet through it; oh, the dried up cherry stone’s fallen out of his pocket. 

Panting as he comes down, Nick strokes Harry’s side and pulls out, condom following with a slight lag and a dribble of warm lube. Nice. He tuts at it as he takes it off, tosses it at the bin, where it lands half on half off like a woman in white in a painting who’s thrown herself on a fainting couch and missed. 

Normally Harry’d cover the awkward with murmurs, say something like, “That was so good, babe, you feel amazing,” before fumbling up his clothes and going home to Niall with ice cream purchased at wherever’s open to watch whatever’s on TV. He’s never actually spent the night with a guy. He wonders how it’s supposed to go, remembers that he promised hair stroking and spooning, maybe both at once. He’s not sure how he gets from jeans around his calves to there; he’s still got half a sock on.

Nick answers the question by urging Harry round to face him. He flattens his hand against Harry’s chest, pushing him back against the table. 

Eying his wilting dick, Harry says, “Optimistic.” 

Nick rolls his eyes. He looks ridiculous: expensive shirt making curtains around his chest and drawing more attention to his nakedness than if he weren’t wearing any clothes. 

His gaze goes to Harry’s cock, which is standing to wavering attention, and he takes Harry’s hand and guides it down, wrapping Harry’s fingers around it. “Show me what you got, porn star.” 

“Oh.”

Smiling, because yeah, he can be into that, Harry inches back onto the table. The half sock and jeans he toes off, too sweaty to be graceful about it – ignores the shriek-like noise his arse makes against the glass as he scooches and leans back, not missing the way Nick tracks the play of muscles on his stomach, the way they linger on his legs. Propping one foot flat on the top, Harry licks his palm and takes hold of his dick. Thumbing the head to spread the moisture around, he touches. His arse clenches as he strokes – Nick’s gaze flicks to it so Harry shifts back, plants his other foot on the back of the closest chair, canting his hips up off the table to give him a better look. He works his hand back and forth, shuts his eyes. Once he’s inside his eyelids, his heartbeat pounds loud underneath his tongue, and he lets his mouth fall open to encourage the sound to escape. 

He doesn’t think of anyone or anything in particular, been a while since he did that, just imagines a bar like the one he was in earlier and someone coming over to him, just this once. 

Wanting to be touched everywhere, he trails his free hand down his chest, pausing to give his nipples a tweak, shivering as it makes his dick twitch in his palm. He rubs at his stomach where the sensation is building and trails his fingers through the hair there, tugging, scratching, moving lower, taking it slow as everywhere below his bellybutton tightens, imagining it’s the casual touch of a stranger who wants nothing more than to stroke the secret inside of his wrist or map his ankle bone with their tongue.

Nick’s shifting, breathing hard, and Harry cracks an eyelid just enough to see him tugging on his soft dick, eyes glazed but acutely trained on him, paying attention as if he daren’t not. If he hadn’t just come Harry thinks this would probably be enough to get him off; the thought makes a warm rush ripple through his belly and he thinks: _yeah, ok. Cool_.

He moves his foot to knock against Nick’s wrist, smiling when Nick strokes across the top of his foot and a little way up over his ankle, tracing the tattoo doodles there. 

“George Michael? Really?”

“Bad day.” Harry attempts a laugh but arousal swallows it and it comes out a breathy chuckle.

He plants his foot on Nick’s shoulder, scrunching up the flower pattern there. Fuck it, Nick wanted a porn star. Moan curling past his lips, he searches out slickness past his balls – which have tucked in tight and hard to be helpful, god he loves them – sneaks a finger, then two, into his arse, body spasming around them. He fists his cock quick and rough, making the most of the instinctive jerks of his body for Nick’s benefit, closing his eyes briefly as the ceiling slants away from him as glassy as what’s under his shoulder blades. He tilts his head back, exposing his throat, metal of his necklaces sliding into the hollow at the base. He imagines Nick’s gaze on his body, collecting mental Polaroids for whenever he needs to get off. It’s not like Harry hasn’t done this in mirrors and in front of Niall, asking him what looks good and what looks never forgotten.

With that in mind he meets Nick’s eye, noise made by the slip of his fingers in and out of his arse covered by his _oh oh ohhh_ s that aren’t entirely for show. He thinks about Ben outside, pretending he can’t hear anything at all at first then maybe jerking off. 

A kiss on his ankle brings him back. Warm, delicate. Nick scratches through his leg hair, up over his knee, tickling the sensitive inside of his thigh. It’s enough to have him real close in that way that happens all of a sudden even though he knew he was aiming for it, and with a gasp Harry starts to come, twisting his fingers deeper until he’s spurting hot and sticky all over his fingers and his stomach, writhing against the glass and digging his toes into Nick’s shoulder as he rides it out. 

He plays with his cock while the aftershocks have their way with him, teasing Nick as well as himself, wondering if he’s one of those guys who heads straight for the solo webcam section when he’s looking for porn. With a sigh he slides his messy fingers up over his belly and laughs at how absurd they must look to the city, him sprawled on the table with one leg cocked up, Nick in just his open shirt watching him, fingers back on his ankle in this weird concoction of prim and debauched. 

Pushing his hair out of his eyes, Harry sits up, propping himself on one elbow.

Nick’s eyes travel down his body like they did in the bar, this time pausing on his butterfly tattoo, tracing the outline. “You really would be at home in Manto,” he says.

“What time’s it open ‘til? We can still go.”

“Think I’d rather have a shower.”

“Party pooper.”

Nick licks his lips and moves off, backwards at first, this puzzled look on his face as his shirt tails flap about his arse until he pulls it off and turns. 

“Nice bum,” Harry says.

That gets him a balled-up really expensive shirt to the face and Nick walks off, running his hands through his hair, leaving the door open as he fiddles with the controls on the shower, testing the temperature.

Harry uses the shirt to wipe the spunk off his stomach, then wishes he hadn’t because the fuck-warm glass is cooling underneath him and maybe it’d’ve been nice to mince about with it on. Skin going goosebumpy, he gets up, wincing at a twinge in his back. He looks around the room for something else – maybe they have those big, fluffy robes – gets distracted by the skylight, the stars playing hide and seek behind some chubby grey clouds. Must be amazing here when there’s a storm. He imagines the noise of the shower is rain bouncing off the roof and wonders what it’s like to be rich enough that a room you can see the stars in is nothing to be impressed by. 

He peeks into the bedroom. It’s got more fabric draped at the window than the booths in the bar he picked Nick up in, although this is all white as if it’s straight out of a packet. Maybe that’s something they do here: each new guest gets a fresh sheet and once they’re used, they get passed down the floors to those in the lesser bedrooms. Or maybe they just get through a lot of Daz. 

Checking the shower’s still running he goes over to the wardrobe – line of suit bags studded with LV symbols, Armani, Gucci, and a heavy coat the colour of toffees that probably falls to Nick’s knees. The shirts are mostly patterned and folded like a shop assistant’s been at them and the few ties are bound up into Arctic Rolls of colour and shine. Couple of pairs of jeans, t shirts and a hoodie by the looks of it sit on the shelf below, but they’re all a bit too nice to pinch when he’s still sweaty and lubed. 

Harry goes into the bathroom, eying one of the towels and thinking maybe he can pull off wearing it as a skirt. Under the water Nick’s humming. He breaks into a song but Harry can’t place it, his voice is so awful. It makes Harry smile. 

The slipperiness of his arse is starting to be irritating, so Harry reaches for Nick’s shampoo from the shelf and just steps under the stream like he knows what he’s doing. 

Nick blinks at him, lashes spikey. 

“What was that you were murdering?” Harry pushes his own hair back as the shower batters it. God, it’s like a warm, tropical storm. He wants to move in.

“New Jay Z record and – what? My version is _sublime_.”

He actually looks offended, which is tricky to pull off all naked and shower-doused; not many people would even try it. 

“He just called, actually, about a duet,” Harry says. “Told him to stop bugging you.”

“Aww, shame. Could’ve been Christmas number one, that.”

He makes a sad face that makes Harry laugh and he’s not sure if it’s that or the initial fuck being out of the way that makes it easier, but something has. He squirts a blob of sickly orange stuff from the bottle into his palm, reaches up to splat it on the top of Nick’s head. 

“Ow.”

“Don’t be a baby.”

He works up a lather, scent of peaches and some kind of flower that lingers in his mother’s perfume blossoming from the bubbles as they slide out of Nick’s hair and down the sides of his face. He stares back, petulant, and so Harry really goes for it, scratching right into his scalp and working his hair up from behind his ears to attempt a mohawk that’ll never actually happen. 

In retaliation Nick blasts him with shower gel, touching him more certainly than when Harry was blowing him but sticking to his shoulders, arms, chest, following the shapes of his muscles as he works it into foam. Harry shampoos his own hair too before shutting off the water. 

“Eh, wh – ”

He holds up the conditioner. “Says you’re supposed to leave it for three minutes.”

Harry gets right in his space, slick chest against slick chest, tip of Nick’s cock nuzzling sweetly against his. Taking his time about it, he slathers both of them with this putty stuff that smells like candyfloss. By the time he sets the tub back on the tiled shelf, Nick’s breathing fast and expectant. He looks up, letting his lip slide through his teeth, watching a droplet run all the way from Nick’s hair to the end of his nose. Nick ducks his head and closes his eyes. Harry takes it as a yes.

Harry kisses his chest on the way down, holds him soft and slippery on his tongue. 

This time when he sucks Nick off, he looks up often, takes it really slow and teases until he’s clutching at the tiles. He ignores the flat pain in his knees like a boyfriend would, because he means to give Nick exactly what he bought.

*

_Everyone – paramedics who man the drunk bus, punters, people who chance past – wants to ask it: “How did you get here? How do you do that, behind a burger van and all?”_

_Was expecting it from you because you have a curious face. Had half a lie written for the moment in my head: fifteen, girl in a dorm in Rouen, I’m the boy with the reputation and she’s bored of being a virgin, asks me to change it for cash. Power thing, make sure I put the effort in –_

_That’s where the lie ran out._

_You worked soap over my knees while I told you the truth: it was Niall who said, “Come on, Harry, we need the money. Do it all the time – it’s not a big deal. It’s not like you don’t put it about, what’s the difference, getting paid for it? Not like you’re picky when we’re out.”_

_Couldn’t fault his logic._

_“Just have to pretend to like them for a while is all,” he said. “Even if you’re not into it, get a bit drunk and it’s really not that bad.”_

_When you asked, I gave you the basics so you could see that it wasn’t: one of his regulars; friend of Simon’s; one of those cocks that’s got a real curve to it; blew him for twenty; decided as I puked in a bin that tequila’s really not my drink._

_Graduating from that was just maths. Guys’ll pay a lot to be the first, or the cost of a boiler repair, which I used to think was a lot. Met him in a well-lit, respectable bar; it was fine. All I really remember is trying to make him laugh so he’d like me enough to be nice. Nipped into the toilets to have a moment beforehand. Whoever’d scrawled on the wall couldn’t spell Jennifer even though they were acquainted enough to know she likes it rough. He followed me in so we never actually got to his house._

_Was a relief, really, not to have to be polite about his furnishings. That’s what I thought as I walked home in the snow: he seemed just well to do enough that he’d have too many but really crappy cushions and that wallpaper that’s so sheeny it hurts to look at._

_If you’re wondering, January wind over denim stings at the scrapes on your knees, and perhaps you knew that, were trying to wash the memory of blood off with your fingers as your kisses slipped over my skin, but not my mouth._

*

Harry hates the skylight. Or not it, exactly, because that’s unfair when all it’s doing is letting the sunshine in. He buries his face in the pillows but it’s too late: having a thought about the skylight has pushed him too awake.

“ – Benjamin.” 

Or maybe not that, actually. Maybe the talking that’s apparently happening. 

“I’ll have the – oh, have I become predictable?” A sniff of laughter and Nick’s voice softens. “No, no that’s grand. And he’ll have – hey Ben, he seem like a fruit salad or a waffles person to you? Or should I get those mini pastry things that’re a week’s worth of calories on a plate?” He pauses, hums. “Do you do a full English? Actually, just bring us a selection and I’ll let him pick when he gets up.”

Harry flips over, making a skirt of the sheet and hugging his knees. Niall is going to lose his shit when he hears about this. 

Nick pads in, suited – a grey that’s more sombre than last night’s blue effort but just as fitted, shirt open almost to the top of his waistcoat. “Oh, morning,” he says. He tosses Harry’s phone onto the sheets. “Someone’s desperate to get hold of you. Been texting you since six.”

“Sorry – didn’t wake you, did they?” Harry flicks through the messages – all from Niall and increasingly badly spelled with more and more exclamation marks. There’s a picture of him at some party, blurred and grinning, eyes too wide to be entirely natural. 

“Trouble?”

Dropping his chin onto his knees, Harry smiles up at him, turning his phone over. “Nope. You keeping your promise of breakfast in bed, then?”

“If you want.” Nick crosses to the bathroom and peers at himself in the mirror, frowning and poking at his hair. “Always think that’s more romantic in adverts than in reality, though. Nowt relaxing about dropping your last piece of toast on the eiderwhatsit and having it come back more fluff than jam.”

“What if I do something seductive with the marmalade?”

“I’m sure you could still work that at the table.”

“Already face and ass prints on it, though. Marmalade too, that’s how rumours you’re kinky start.”

Nick snorts and abandons his hair in favour of going back out into the lounge. 

Harry sits there scrolling through other pictures from last night’s party for a while, but then he gets curious about exactly what Nick’s typing so furiously this early in the morning. He tries to tug a sheet free to drape around himself like a toga – he’s seen people do it in films – but the thing won’t come with him. He yanks but it must be sewn to the mattress to prevent exactly this sort of thing, so after huffing at it in frustration, he just grabs his phone and goes out there naked. He’s scratching at his stomach when Nick looks up from his laptop and swallows. 

Harry smirks, dropping a hand to his hip, but a smart rap on the door interrupts before anything can really take off.

Swinging down on his way to answer it, Nick plucks Harry’s boxers out of the tangle he left on the floor and tosses them into his chest. “Ben don’t need to see that.”

Harry tugs them on, grabbing his t-shirt too from the sofa and just getting it over his head when Ben comes in with a fancy trolley laden with silver domes.

“Morning,” he says. “Would you prefer this on the table or the balcony?”

“Table.”

Nick resumes typing as Ben fusses with the plates and cutlery. Feeling useless standing there in his pants, Harry goes over and reaches for the butter dish, setting it on the table, only for Ben to smile at him primly and move it four inches to the right. 

“Enjoy,” he says, when he’s done, and offers them both a little bow as he backs out, the trolley trundling with him and Nick looking up too late to say thanks. 

“Mine’s the poached egg on spinach,” he says. “Help yourself to everything else.”

Harry pulls the top off one of the domes. It’s scalding – “Shit!” – and it clangs as he drops it onto one of the others. He sucks his fingers into his mouth and pointedly, Nick looks at a linen napkin that’s folded over the handle of one of the serving dishes and a tiny tent of cardboard that says: _in case your enthusiasm for our wares makes your forgetful, here’s your reminder that dishes fresh from the kitchen will be hot._

Harry snatches the napkin up and opens another platter, forgetting his singed digits immediately when it’s pancakes, strawberries, and syrup. He slides onto the chair without pulling it out from the table and grabs a fork, slicing into the pancake and shovelling a great wodge of it and a strawberry into his mouth. He’s gone for far too much and he can barely get his teeth around it. He washes it down with a mouthful of juice he expects to be orange but it’s far too sweet, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and lifts up the edge of another dome with a spoon. 

This one’s Nick’s so he sets a knife and fork on the edge of the plate and slides it over, following it with a cup of coffee he pours from the cafetiere steaming in the middle of the table. “No milk no sugar, right?” he says. 

“Oh, you mind read, do you?”

“Coffee read. Comes in handy.”

Nick cocks an eyebrow and reaches for the cup. He smiles in response to Harry hooking a toe around his calf and running it up to his knee, but his eyes dart back to his laptop as his email pings.

Harry pouts and gives the plate with the spinach a prod. “Eggs’ll get all rubbery.”

Rolling his eyes, Nick closes his laptop and pulls the plate towards him. He winds some wilted spinach around his fork, eating it daintily before reaching for something on the other side of his MacBook. 

He hands Harry a paper – _Le Monde_. 

Unsure if he’s taking the piss, Harry sets it down next to his plate so he can see the headline and a picture of Angela Merkel frowning. He purses his lips as he skims the columns for familiar words, lifting his juice to his lips, but it’s still not orange. 

“What’s going on in the world, then?” Nick says, sipping his coffee. 

“Headline says ‘everything’s shit, stay in bed.’”

Harry turns the page as if he’s actually reading it, battling with the fold as the thing turns into a giant paper flapping bird. He settles for finding an insert, which apparently is holidays.

“You planning a trip? Weekend at Euro Disney with your mates from nursery?”

With a quiet seethe, Harry steals a string of his spinach. “Never been,” he says, dropping it onto his tongue. “Went to Rouen with school once.”

“And how was that?”

“Got sea sick on the ferry and there was a load of, like, scum on the beach.” Harry pauses, flicking through the memory. “Oh, and there was this shop. Sold sweets – sugar mice – like, giant humungous pink ones. Felt really bad about eating them, just sucking on their heads until their faces wore off. Would’ve started on the other end but I couldn’t get them in my mouth ‘cos – ”

“Big on the hip?”

“Yeah. Probably manage them now, though, I’ve had more large items in my – ”

Nick’s cup hovers on the way to his face, never quite arriving. Harry replays what he just said and he thinks later, when he really considers this, it's going to seem an odd conversation to have over spinach and pancakes. 

“Um – not just penises. Generally.”

“No, tell me more about the penises,” Nick says, cup clinking as he sets it down. “What my previous stays here have been missing is a hard on with my mango juice.”

“Oh, that what that is?” Harry takes another slurp and reaches for one of the platters he hasn’t investigated yet, shielding his fingers with his t-shirt. He lifts it up to find bacon underneath. He snags a rasher and offers it to Nick, nibbling the end of it himself when Nick declines. “Always wanted to go to Paris. Do that thing where you throw a padlock in the canal.” 

“It’s a river and – fine, shun the knives if you must but will you use a goddamn fork?” Nick huffs, rolls his eyes when Harry reaches for another rasher with his fingers, just to see what expression he might make. “Feral child.”

Harry meets his eye and lazily licks the grease off his fingers.

Closing his eyes, Nick swallows. “And it’s the key you chuck – you leave the padlock on the bridge, otherwise you just look like you’re having a weird sort of tantrum.”

“Maybe that’s what I meant. Maybe I want to go to Paris and have a weird sort of tantrum. Like I’ve gone _in-Seine_.” 

“Oh god,” Nick groans, “just have all the bacon at once – have a pastry – Jesus just put something in your mouth before you realise there’s comedy potential – and I use the term lightly – in getting an Eiffel.”

Sniggering, Harry dips into his plate, theatrically grabbing a fork and waving it at Nick before spearing a tomato. “You ever been?”

“Couple of times.”

Harry pictures Nick at a café in sunglasses with a coffee in one of those tiny little mugs you can’t even get a finger in the handle of. There’s no one on the other side of the table, though. Huh. 

“What’s it like?”

“Like Canal Street,” he says. “People go there with fancy ideas, hoping for romance, and they get something that looks a bit like it if they squint, limp home with a hole in their wallet and a dink in their soul.”

On the table, Nick’s phone jumps into life, vibrating like it’s possessed against the jam. The picture on the front is of a leering chunky blonde with a ruddy nose and a yard of ale in his hand.

“Work. I’ve got to – ” Nick lifts the phone to his ear. “James? It’s not even eight o’sodding clock, this better be – oh.” 

There’s a certain kind of phone call Harry hates overhearing: ones where the person in front of him is obviously hearing something they don’t want to but he has to wait to find out what. It’s how he found out about his granddad’s death, how the dog had escaped and got hit by a car, although the all time worst was probably when he was six and a busybody called his mum to tell her about his dad’s affair. He hauls his jeans up from where they spent the night on the floor, and fishes in the pocket for his earphones, untangling them and trying not to listen as Nick murmurs into his phone.

He and the caller disappear as Harry plugs in and turns the volume up. He goes back to his plate and pushes a strawberry around, trying to work out what to do if someone Nick works with has died. The strawberry’s cut half up and he thinks that it looks like a heart that’s bleeding caramel; apt. He’s still staring at it when his ear bud falls out. He scrambles for it but it's in Nick’s hand.

Nick’s crouching at his side and frowning. 

Harry pushes his hair out of his eyes and fixes a smile that could turn sympathetic on his face, but all Nick says is:

“What in god’s name is this? Is that an actual vocoder?” 

The phone call’s clearly over and wasn’t anything calamitous. Light foolishness crawls up Harry’s spine to rest cold and clammy against the back of his neck. Maybe Matt dying got to him. Maybe it’s the sugar rush. 

Nick takes Harry’s phone and hits the next arrow, filling Harry’s other ear with Bronski Beat, then Motley Crue, then Pink Floyd. Craning away until his eyes are nothing but crinkles, Nick drops the earphone like it’s actually putrid. “Christ, do you have anything in here recorded after 1989?”

“Nope. Like the eighties.” Nick’s eyebrows demand explanation but Harry can’t really think of anything, so he offers, “They were a simpler time? ‘Cept, like, fashion wise. Ruffles are complicated. Not for beginners. Mullet, though, would be a good entry level statement.”

He nods like one of those women with fourteen degrees on _Question Time_ , hits the pause button and winds the lead around the handset until the earphones are trapped and tight against the case, all the time Nick’s gaze heating his cheeks. He’s not used to doing this sort of thing where the daylight can find him. The handful of times he’s done this with women they’ve woken him for another round before kicking him out, and he skipped off into the sunrise pulling on his trainers and hopping down the road past judgemental, early-rising neighbours.

“So what did the dickhead from your office want?” he says.

“How’d you know – ”

“Dickhead face.”

Nick smiles and tries to hide it, turning to look out of the window. “Rang just to piss me off, I think.”

Biting his lip, Harry reaches for a piece of toast. “What do you, like, do?” he says, ripping off the corner of a slice. “You never said.”

“I buy struggling record companies.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“Not really.” 

Nick considers Harry as he chomps his way through his toast.

“Say – ” Nick drums on his knee with a knuckle. “ – you got any big and exciting plans for today?”

Harry shakes his head, because what he actually planned to do was go home, log onto his internet banking, and stare at the number on the screen until his eyes hurt. 

And maybe buy some new trainers, now he thinks about it. And some food wouldn’t go amiss.

“You up for dinner, theoretically?”

“Just dinner, or – ?”

“Same arrangement plus dinner someplace fancy. You’d need to turn on the charm big time. You up for that?”

“Er, sure.” It sounds like a question so Harry adds a more emphatic, “Yeah, of course. Be flirty, sweet, blow you under the table, whatever you want.”

Nick smiles and his knuckles stop knocking, just rest there on his skin. He stares at them, even though, objectively speaking, Harry’s knees are the least attractive part of him. 

“And,” Nick says, tongue wetting the corner of his mouth, “if I wanted you to stay the rest of the week, how much would that set me back?”

“What?”

The toast quadruples in size, drains of all moisture, and wedges somewhere near where Harry’s lungs start. 

“I’ll be here until Sunday. Days would be your own unless something comes up. There’ll be functions and they’ll probably be tedious but I’ll throw in breakfast and dinner. Shall we say four grand?”

Harry’s insides retreat as he tries to make four grand sit still in his head as a concept long enough to picture what it might look like stacked up on his bed. 

“Seven and I’ll make you cake?” he says.

“They’ve a Michelin starred restaurant downstairs with a pastry chef who does nothing but flounce around all day muttering about choux consistency. Five.”

Leaning in, Harry curls his fingers under the collar of Nick’s shirt and draws him in until they’re nose to nose. “Six,” he says, “and I’ll send you messages at work that make the day fly by and mean you can’t wait to come home to me.”

Nick’s smile is wry and Harry thinks he’s going to quibble that this is hotel not home, but instead he says, “Done,” and gets to his feet. “Money I’ll transfer daily in instalments. You’ll have today’s by lunch, but – ” He pulls out his wallet and flicks through half a dozen cards. “ – here.” 

He holds one out – it’s actual fucking platinum.

“PIN’s one-two-three-four. Limit’s ten grand but you can only draw two hundred in cash. Go into town and buy yourself a couple of outfits more suitable for dinner than a t-shirt with a limp cock on. Meet me downstairs in the bar at seven. What’s the PIN? Say it back to me.”

“One two three four?”

“And we’re meeting at – ”

“Seven?”

“Good,” Nick says, downing the last of his coffee. “See you later. Oh, and if you’re going to rip me off, at least be imaginative so I get a laugh out of it when the bank calls.” 

He grabs his laptop, and he’s gone, leaving Harry staring at a bunch of unopened breakfast offerings and wondering how long it’ll take him to work out what the fuck just happened.

*

_Every time I hear that song about a girl who walks in through the out door, I wonder why the shop has two doors. The only ones I can think of that do that are supermarkets – you come in by the fruit and out through the checkouts – but you can’t walk in through the checkouts, it’s more of a hurdle. I’ve tried it. Wilko, IKEA, same thing, and Five and Dime sounds more like a retro secondhandy place but then how is that big enough for two doors? Were there really that many hipsters when Prince was a thing?_

_I hate songs I can’t make sense of. Should probably delete it off my phone but it reminds me of you. Not just because we listened to it together but because I bet you could walk in through an out door. Probably do it all the time. I’m not the kind who can pull it off; more likely to push a pull door, like when I went to Kings Street and fell right into Hugo Boss._

_Went back there today. About pissed myself beforehand, but they were playing that song in Starbucks when I stopped for a fortifying latte, and because you were in it, I was ok._

_Raspberret would suit you. I should look up what a Five and Dime is, sometime, or maybe I just want to muse on it forever and keep you and it alive._

*

At seven, the bar is empty of Nick, even though Harry’s two minutes late. He stands at the counter with the cocktail menu, pulling at the buttons of his collar and trying not to fiddle with his hair. He focuses on what Ben said as he stood him in front of the mirror:

“Were I not a happily married man, I’d be utterly beguiled.” 

If he’s honest, Harry still feels a bit like a kid at a wedding. Rental suit – even a really fancy one – will do that to you, but it’s been one of those Wile E. Coyote days when every time you think you’re about to run into a tunnel, it’s just a big black circle painted on a wall.

“What can I get for you, sir? The Apple Pie Martini recently won the Silver Shaker Cocktail of the Year from Top Table.”

Harry looks up to see who the woman behind the bar’s talking to. Realising it’s him, he goes a bit wide and doll-like at the mouth and tries to turn it into a smile. “Yeah, sounds good, thanks.”

He hasn’t been called sir by anyone but _Big Issue_ sellers, and they were being sarcastic. It’s probably the flannel Ben chose. It has a sort of gravitas, he reckons, or maybe she can sense the platinum credit card burning a hole in his thigh.

“Well let’s just have a drink, shall – ”

At the sound of his voice, Harry looks over at Nick with a smile. His hair says he’s had a Roadrunner day and he hesitates, as if he’s checking Harry is who he thinks. Figures, Harry supposes. Nick did mostly view his face squashed into a table or wrapped around his dick. 

A fraction too late, Nick says, “Oh, there he is.” 

He’s accompanied by a woman with spirals of hair that extrude at near 90 degrees from her temples and another who’s nearly as wide as she is tall because she’s wrapped in a giant faux fur the colour of marbles. 

“Sorry we’re late, Harry, driver took the kind of scenic route where you’ve time to feel your nose hairs growing.”

Harry shifts up onto his toes to plant a kiss on Nick’s cheek as they meet. “Worth the wait,” he says and the woman with the curls rolls her eyes.

“Get me a fucking vodka.” 

Irish, then, but harsher than Niall. 

“This is the very charming Annie Mac,” Nick says, “and her colleague Aimee. They run Mac No Cheese.” 

“Would love to go there and eat some time.” 

“It’s this country’s most influential dance label,” Aimee says without looking up from her phone, New York accent making it sound as if she’s reading a press release she wrote and therefore doesn’t believe.

“Oh.” 

After a quick glance at Nick, who looks like he’s trying to swallow a gale-force guffaw, Harry holds his hand out for each of them in turn. Annie offers him a disinterested grunt while Aimee gives Harry a quick once over from behind purple rimmed spectacles and goes back to clicking away on her phone, text speed not quite as impeded as Harry would’ve imagined by two inch long leopard print fingernails.

Nick touches the dip in Harry’s back for a second, leaning in on pretence of beckoning the bartender over, meeting Harry’s eye askance with a little shake of his head, like, _forget it. It’s not you_.

Drinks ordered – Harry’s comes in a triangle glass and has a string of peel in it that must have left a Granny Smith feeling terribly exposed – they’re ushered to a table in the window by one of the white-coated wait staff and issued with menus. 

Annie flips hers open and whistles. “Jesus H Christ, Grimshaw. I know you’ve earned a packet selling your soul, but – ”

“Just a side salad for you and your morals, then?”

“Steady on,” she says, batting away Nick’s hand as he tries to take the menu. “And pass the olives.”

Harry slides the dish towards her, navigating a small jar of flowers. Oh. A sneeze worms its way up between his eyes and he squeezes his nose to keep it away, retreats into a raise of his glass, trying to meet Aimee’s eye as he would if he were trying to pick her up in a bar. He takes a sip of his drink, accidentally sucking up the end of the peel. It dangles like a zip line from his bottom lip to his glass. Cross-eyed, he studies it, making an assessment as to whether he can suck it all up into his mouth and eat it before she or anyone else notices. Maybe if he deep throated it? He decides not and lets it go, screwing one eye shut as it plops back into the glass with a splash worthy of a bad diver at the Olympics. 

It gets Aimee’s attention at least, provoking a frown. He tries a smile but that just makes the frown deepen and her hitch her glasses up her nose. 

It’s an awkward silence. Like, he’s heard the phrase before but never really felt one rise up around him.

He clears his throat.

“D’you ever wonder,” Harry says, “how they get the garlic in the stuffed ones when a garlic clove and an olive are roughly the same size?”

“Not really.”

“Oh.”

No, _this_ is an awkward silence. The one before was merely self-conscious and a bit gangly. 

Harry ducks behind the menu looking for sanctuary, scrolling down the mains.

_Carpaccio of octopus, green apple & borage_

Goddddd, what the fuck is that? Green apple, yeah, ok, they’ve probably got a barrel of those ready-peeled on account of the award-winning cocktails but carpaccio and borage? Sounds like something his stepdad would try and order in Starbucks before storming off muttering about why it’s not just possible to order a big coffee and a Danish anymore.

He scrolls for a dish the contents of which he actually understands, but it’s all roasted quail with girolles and ballotine of duck liver and why did his education not cover what an artichoke with truffled egg yolk is? Since when is ‘truffle’ a verb? Holding the coil of peel out of the way with his thumb this time, Harry takes a swig of his Martini, sourness of the apple striking the roof of his mouth and the swift kick of alcohol to his empty stomach making his eyes go wide and the room rear up. Great. Pissed at dinner where he has to try and say ‘girolles’ like he knows whether that’s some kind of exotic animal or a cooking method. 

On the other side of the table, the conversation has carried on without him and he really should’ve stuck with the menu because as soon as he looks up, Aimee says, “You got a take on this, kid?”

Her glasses kind of cut her eyes in half so it’s like being judged by both a human and a large, tetchy beetle. 

“Mostly trying to work out what a ballotine is?”

“Fella off _Dragon’s Den_ , isn’t he?” Annie shoves her vodka glass – now empty – away. “We ready to order, then? I got somewhere to be. Oi, mate, when you’re ready?”

Shit. 

Sliding his phone out of his pocket and holding it under the table, Harry thumbs his browser awake, but it takes an age to open and the waitress is already on her way. Panic rising up his thighs, Harry thinks about texting Niall but Niall’s been AWOL all day and though he can recite the menu of Nando’s by heart, this is probably a little out of his league. Instead he types:

> _help_

He sends it to Nick.

The message buzzes on the table. Nick looks at it, then at Harry, who looks pointedly at the menu and makes a face that he intends to mean ‘why are they making truffle a verb?’ but if the expression of confusion Nick throws him back is anything to go by actually says, ‘have I got something stuck to my face?’

Aimee and Annie go for the trout – where the fuck did they find something as normal sounding as trout? – oh godddd there’s a whole page he didn’t even look at stuck to the cover, and as Nick orders the carpaccio thing Harry knocks his ankle under the table.

Nick starts, glowering at him, tilting his head, like, _wtf?_

Harry leans in with the menu. 

“What, you want me to pick for you?” Nick says. 

Thank fuck, he’s a genius. Harry is going to be so fucking nice to him later.

“Yeah? All looks so good. Apart from the octopus. I’m just – not in the mood for ink. Unless you want to get a tattoo with me later, in which case, maybe.”

Nick hesitates as if he’s not sure whether Harry’s joking and even less sure if it’s funny, then orders the artichoke. At least Harry’s going to walk out of this with a new fun fact about how you truffle something to bore stoners with at Niall’s parties. Ordering them a bottle of wine too, Nick hands his and Harry’s menus back, fingers twisting the cord of his bracelet into a knot and back out again. 

Harry wonders if he should hold his hand. He said be charming – but charming to him in a boyfriend package way or to his friends? He inches his fingers over, watching Nick’s reactions. 

Nick reaches for his drink, leaving Harry’s hand just lying there like some kind of bony five-headed snail too far onto the table to be entirely natural. Harry keeps going and pokes at the flowers as if that’s what he intended all along. 

“Pretty,” he says, to no one in particular.

One of the daisy’s heads falls off.

“So,” Nick says, perhaps to cover the way Harry swears and snatches his hand back to tuck it into his armpit before it goes all Disney villain and condemns the rest of the posy to withering death, “shall we get the business out of the way?” 

“Really rather wait for the wine if you’re going to yap.”

“Aw, I’m not that bad.” Nick pouts, wrapping his fingers around his wrist. “What did you think of my offer? I’ve seen your quarterly report and it’s more than fair.” 

Annie turns in her seat, earrings wedging against the shoulders of her pineapple-covered dress. “Is this the kind of place where everyone’s too concerned about their waistline for there to be any bread? I’m starving.”

“Can’t we just have a chat about it? Don’t want things to get hostile.”

“Then getting your Jack Russell of an accountant to call me late at night and make threats about the Inland Revenue set entirely the wrong tone.”

“He did that without my say so. Hate having to ball someone out before I’ve touched my breakfast,” Nick says, sipping his cocktail. “You know how upset I get when I haven’t eaten.”

“Oh, that’s what made you sad this morning?” Harry says. 

All eyes are on him. Shit. 

Aimee’s eyebrows rise in two perfect painted-on arches and Nick stiffens in his seat. 

“I wasn’t – make me sound like a – anyway, let’s not let that scupper what could be a great relationship.”

Annie turns to Aimee. “These words coming out of his mouth, you think he even knows what they mean?”

“Doubt it. Longest relationship is with his phone contract.”

The waiter delivers the wine, offering Nick a sample, which he waves off because he knows the vintage. Harry wants to, like, bask in that but apparently he’s the only one who thinks it’s a big deal.

“You must’ve known it was only a matter of time before someone tried to snap you up. Better my mitts on your roster than some faceless multi-national.”

“Why?” Annie says, raising her wine glass to her lips. “Because I know you’re a bastard and you’ll fuck me over so I won’t be surprised when it happens?”

Nick catches Harry’s eye. “This is where you leap to my defence.”

“Uhm – ”

While Harry struggles to form a sentence, Annie drums her fingernails on the table with the air of woman who wants to rip out someone’s throat and she’s not terribly concerned whose.

“I think he’s nice.”

“Let me guess,” Aimee says, with a sigh, swiping though the messages on her phone, “you met at a party, you’ve an aftershave campaign for Givenchy but really you want to start a rescue centre for abandoned schnauzers?”

“Not really but if they need help maybe I could think about making a donation?”

Annie and Aimee exchange a look, incredulous, and Harry twitches his nose against another sneeze. As an excuse to turn away and press his finger up under it to hold it in, he leans over and steals the olives from the next table. He slides them across the wood, pretending he’s scratching his lip.

“You – finished,” he says. “Er – those tables near the toilet – can probably snag the ones on there too without anyone noticing, if you want.”

“Well at least you’re slightly more interesting than advertised,” Aimee says, spearing an olive with her pinkie nail. “Klepto tendencies – ”

“Sweet that you’ve both got robbing stuff in – ”

“Hey, they’re free, I’m not – ”

“Can’t blame either of us for taking advantage of a sitting duck.”

It’s unfortunate, really, that it’s Nick’s “duck” that lands as the last word, the only one that’s truly audible in the morass. 

“Grimshaw – ” Annie narrows her eyes and points at Nick across the table like she’s trying to distance stab him through the spleen. “ – tell me you did not just compare _my company_ – the one at which you got your big fucking break – to a dozy mallard?” 

It’d take a big man not to laugh at the words ‘dozy mallard’, and Nick’s not quite up to the task. He sniggers into his sleeve, barely managing to rein it in with a lick of his lips 

Annie pushes off the table, bangles jangling. 

“Annie, wait. You know I think your label’s a swan.” She stops her ascent at least, and Nick goes all soft and quiet. “I think it’s a huge, brilliant, majestic swan. Breaks my heart to think it’s got fishing line wrapped around its neck like those poor bastards you used to see on _Blue Peter_.”

Harry wants to chip in and help him but all he can think about is the time he entered a poetry contest and felt like shit because he didn’t win, didn’t even get a badge for effort, even though he wrote a sonnet. Free form. With a painting.

“I stole olives,” Harry says, “pretend there’s a branch on them?” 

Annie considers him for a moment, then slumps back down and offers Nick the dish over the table. “Fine. You want one?”

“Urgh, no thanks. Dunno how you can eat those things, they’re – ”

“Horrible little secret not-grape ninjas.” Harry sweeps his hair out of the way as he finishes Nick’s sentence in a decent impression of his voice, and Nick just stares at him like he’s about to fall off his chair. “You said, last night.”

“Said a lot of things, you remember them all?”

“Probably not but – er – your favourite cheese is Cheese String even though you’re not sure it’s even technically a cheese, you like saffron gin because you think it’s pretty, when you were sixteen you were obsessed with Craig David, and you think raisins are evil, but you never explained why.” 

“Cheese String, Nick?” Aimee says. “And you say Americans are philistines.”

Annie smiles into her wine, gaze falling down to the olive dish that’s mostly oil. “Got me thinking, now. How _do_ they get the garlic in there, then? Slice of pepper or lemon or one of your wee mozzarellas no problem, but garlic?”

“Some dropout job,” Aimee says. 

“Guess things could be worse, then,” Annie says. “Instead of siting here trying to save my life’s work from the clutches of the prince of darkness, I could be ripping the innards out of olives in a factory.” 

Harry tops up her glass and offers the bottle to Nick. He nods, looking at Harry like he’s reassessing, and Harry pours for him, giving it a little twist of his wrist to stop the race of a drip down its elegant neck. 

“Lived above a pub for a while,” he says, even though nobody was wondering how or why he knows to do that, probably. 

The waitress appears with steaming platters, announcing, “Two trout?”

“About bloody time.” 

Annie waves her in, and she positions them on the table with the meticulous attention to their angle relative to fork and wine glass of an obsessive compulsive. She brings Nick and Harry’s over with a similar flourish and does an odd little bow before backing away, as if she’s taking the curtain at a panto. 

Harry stares at the dish, where a squat green alien of a plant sits in a pool of froth. He fingers a fork as everyone else tucks in making noises of anticipation and appreciation, lines up his knife, attempting to saw a bit off, but the thing’s tougher than it looks and slides through the foam, making a tidal wave that almost spills off the side. He looks around for anyone else who might be eating it to see what method they’re using, but most people seem to have gone for the trout and god, some guy has a steak and chips – how the hell did Harry miss that? He makes an air grab for the artichoke, thinking to eat it like an apple, but does he set it down between bites, what? Jesus, he’s going to go through half a bottle of wine washing this thing down. 

“Can I try before you demolish it?” Nick says, touching his elbow.

At Harry’s perplexed nod, he leans in and plucks one of the leaves off the outside, dunking it in the yellow stuff before dragging it through his teeth to pull off the flesh, setting the remainder down on the plate’s lip. 

“Oh,” Harry says, and sniffs a laugh into his own shoulder before copying. 

It’s not bad, and he eats his way around the thing while the others chat about a festival on the Isle of Wight that’s going to be headlined by a DJ who’s scared of flying. The talk broadens out to music generally while they eat, Annie gabbing about some new remix that’s going to be massive and forgetting she’s irritated with Nick when he agrees. He takes her side against Aimee in a discussion about whether the Chemical Brothers were just a couple of chancers who got lucky, and by the time Aimee’s folding her hands in her lap and admitting that _Hold Tight London_ was _all right_ Nick looks rather pleased.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” Annie says, waving her wineglass at Harry. 

“Not really his area. Young Harold’s tastes are fairly old skool.”

“Two step, grime – ”

“Eighties.”

“That’s so old skool,” Aimee says, “it’s kindergarten.” 

“Something to be said for it, though,” Annie says, “days before everything was so corporate. Back then a DJ had to know what they were doing and club nights had something more than novelty value going for them.” 

“Oh spare me the history rewrite on the halcyon days of the Hacienda," Nick says. "Only reason they didn’t do exactly what I did is they’d all had so much e, even if they’d been able to get a spreadsheet open they’d just have asked to marry it. It’s not my fault most DJs are only interested in counting as far as the number of cans of Diet Coke they requested on their rider.”

The look Annie shoots Nick could turn milk to yogurt. “What you think, Harry? You like everything being all shiny and samey and franchised?”

Harry finishes the last of his artichoke, feeling like a mouse being tossed into a trap. He throws a look at Nick for help, but Nick doesn’t see – no, wait, he did. He’s just ignoring it. Great.

“Um – don’t really know anything about clubbing, but one time we were bored, me and my friend Niall, so we decided to just go to the station and get the first train to somewhere we’d never been before. We ended up in Cardiff. Didn’t know everything would be Welsh and we didn’t know anywhere to go so we went to Starbucks.” Harry presses his fingers to his temple, running back through his words to pick out why they’re all looking at him as if he’s talking gibberish. “Er – Niall’s allergic to lactose – makes him go all puffy and green and he’s blond so that’s – and they do soy, so.” He leans in, fiddling with the stem of his wine glass. “It’s nice to wander about, try new experiences, but sometimes you just want something safe.” 

“Music is not milk,” Annie says. “No one’s allergic to it.”

“Maybe?” Harry says, with a conciliatory nod. “But people can be unsure? Someone might want to go to a Starbucks club because they like to know what to expect.” 

“You don’t get bored?”

“Well, that time in Cardiff, they had those salted caramel square things and we’d never had those before so we got them too. So, like, you might go to a chain expecting to get what you’ve always got – but that doesn’t mean if they’ve got something different you won’t try it once you’re there.” 

When Harry looks up, Nick’s grinning. “Shall I have someone from my office send over the paperwork, Annie?”

“Fuck you, Grimshaw. He’s a plant.” Annie throws her napkin onto the table and leans on it, peering at Harry through the candlelight. “What’re you? Intern from his office who did drama and a term at charm school, what?” 

Nick laughs, swirling his wine around in his glass. “He’s just a pal who had nowhere better to go for dinner. You want to keep on putting out your salt and caramel and I’m offering you a way to do it. It’ll just be under a different name, that’s all.”

“Yeah yeah.” Annie huffs and pushes her plate away. “Aimee said something similar, actually.”

“But with less dairy.”

“ _Much_ less dairy. Practically no dairy.”

“ _Clearly_ where I went wrong.” Aimee hitches her glasses up her nose. “Dumb of me, huh, to use real business terminology when I could’ve gone latte analogy.”

Draining her glass, Annie checks the time on Aimee’s phone. “We better do one, eh?”

Aimee slides to her feet, scraping her coat off the back of her chair. “Speak soon,” she says, and air kisses Nick as he stands. 

Harry gets the same treatment – waft of perfume from the flowers hitting him in the back of the throat as he brushes them with his jacket – and Annie gives him a punch on the shoulder and a half-hug while she goes for leaving a messy lipstick kiss just to the side of Nick’s mouth. He watches until they’ve hailed a cab and hopped in. They both give Nick the finger as they roll off towards the traffic lights.

“Well that was – dinner,” Nick says, wiping at the smudge of red on his face. He drops the napkin and his head onto his hand, turning on his seat. It feels like the first time Nick’s really looked at him since he arrived and he takes his time about it, gaze falling from Harry’s hair to his chin to the polka dot shirt Ben fastened him into, finally rambling over the grey flannel trousers and their perfect crease over his knees. “You scrub up all right, don’t you?” 

Harry smiles at the table, thumbing the wood. 

“You have a good time shopping?”

Harry’s thumb goes white as he presses it onto the edge. In it he see the face of the shop guy whose mouth pursed as he asked for help, hears the click-click-click of the jumper-teaser’s heels, their laughter, in which dwelt the scorn of everyone from his first teacher who thought it ridiculous he couldn’t tie his laces to the kids who thought it hilarious to wrap tape around his knees and push him over in the playground. He’s not supposed to be that kid anymore; he’s a high – all right, medium class hooker for god’s sake. 

“Was all right.”

A medium class hooker who apparently can’t even say three words without sounding like he’s lying. Which he is, but – 

“Lunch tomorrow? Pick me up at my accountant’s office and make everyone jealous?”

Harry runs through an item he watched on _This Morning_ about capsule wardrobes and how to make a week of outfits from of one suit, but he’s pretty sure buying a sarong and making it into three different kinds of halter and a skirt for casual Friday isn’t going to cut it.

Maybe he can stay in bed until Nick’s gone and then go and buy something – that’ll work as long as Nick doesn’t open the wardrobe and realise there’s nothing new in it. Revised plan: put Nick in a sex coma, nip out, sweet-talk Ben into lending him some suit bags from their dry cleaning service and put those in the wardrobe for morning, then wait until Nick’s gone to work and go shopping. Wear a disguise so the gits from earlier don’t recognise him. Get changed in the toilets somewhere. The thought of all that sneaking makes Harry want to throw up his artichoke and truffled foam and god, what would that look like?

“You want pudding?” Nick says.

“If you do?”

“Pick one and have it sent upstairs. Meet you up there. I just need to make a quick call and fill my lungs with nicotine.” Standing, Nick smooths the front of his shirt. “Don’t look so worried. I assure you I’m far too tired to do anything kinky with lavender panna cotta.”

Harry forces a laugh, gaze trailing after Nick as he steps outside and lights a cigarette inside a cupped palm. He’s the kind of person who paces and gestures while he talks on the phone, makes all these faces it’s a shame the other person can’t see. Harry’s so into watching, the waitress startles him when she comes over and asks Harry if there’ll be anything else. In a flap, Harry peruses the dessert menu but it’s all interminable – especially at speed – so he says just the bill, intending to pay with Nick’s card so he’s at least got something right. But of course Nick’s already arranged to have it charged to the room so Harry just says thanks three times and ducks out of the restaurant while Nick’s outside fisting his hair into a giant spike. He takes the lift up to the top floor, where Ben’s leafing through the reservations on the computer.

“How went the big dinner date?” 

Harry has no idea who you’re supposed to be in front of a grown man who quite recently dressed you up, dusted you off, and has warm, currant eyes that make you feel like a six year old an aunt has snuck a sherry to at Christmas. 

He goes over and leans on the desk, looking up at Ben through his hair. “He liked the suit.”

“And why wouldn’t he?” Ben closes the window and folds his hands together. “He’s – joining you? Because I’m afraid without a resident I can’t allow – ”

“On his way.” 

So Ben’s rumbled him for sure, then. This afternoon he pointedly referred to Harry as _Mr Grimshaw’s personal assistant_ as he ordered him a suit from wherever this came from, giving Harry a look that let him know to play along. Nothing to be done about it, really, so gnawing his lip, Harry adds, “What’s his favourite sweet?” 

“I believe I once saw him eat a Mars bar.”

“Meant, like, pudding.”

“My apologies. Most frequently he orders vanilla ice cream.”

“That wasn’t on the menu.”

“No. Sprinkles?” Ben smiles in a way that reminds Harry of some kind of cartoon god, like it’s just a bit too perfect to be mortal. 

“Thanks. For – today as well. Do I have to take the suit off now?”

“I’ll collect it at noon tomorrow and return it on your behalf.”

Ben clicks his fingers for Harry to give him his key card, but Harry ignores him, shooing him off. “I’ll let myself in. You’re busy.”

Harry bests the door and tucks the key card into the cradle on the wall, feeling very proud of himself for mastering the locking mechanism. He strips off his jacket and untucks his shirt, toeing off his shoes and socks and leaving them in a trail across the lounge on his way to the bathroom. 

Quick rinse and a light fingering done – this new lube he got is pretty fucking awesome – he digs out his phone and puts some music on. He thumbs to a compilation he made when he first arrived in Manchester and spent three weeks not sleeping, worrying about what he was going to do for money when he couldn’t even find a job turning burgers over or selling magazines. He unlocks the doors to the balcony and steps through, nets wrapping around his legs like clingy ghosts, wrought iron cold under his toes. 

It’s not a breath-taking view, more one that makes a person breathe really steadily and noisily, as if it makes you more aware that you’re a body, an echo of the city, veins for roads and blood for the flow of cars, that you have to keep pushing them out round the ring road with a forced beat of your heart. 

He takes a picture and posts it with the caption: _seen better views._

While he’s there he scrolls through pictorial representations of Niall’s day: he got up late, eyes red in a selfie he took in the cracked bathroom mirror of somewhere Harry can’t recognise; had lunch with their mates; helped (or probably more likely hindered) as Zayn finished a chunk of the mural he’s painting on one of the railway arches. He thumbs a hello into a bubble and while he’s waiting for a reply, two track changes happen, and one of them’s a 12” edit that’s nearly eight minutes long. Too late he realises he could’ve talked about that at dinner, how he used to think the 7” and the 12” mix was about dick sizes, like a boast.

He’s leaning out to breathe in real deep and see if he can see the canal, the train station, and Princess Street where the boys and Niall will be tonight when Nick comes in.

“Don’t jump. They’d never get your blood out of that shirt and I was going to ask if I could borrow it.”

Nick tosses his phone onto the table, shedding his jacket as he comes to step through the curtains. Without it, he looks younger or maybe just less certain, waistcoat nipping him in and clinging to the line of his back, bracelets dangling over the city as he leans on the railing. He doesn’t say anything, so Harry pokes him with a jab of toes to his calf.

“Tonight was interesting. Happened real fast, though.”

“Aww, you get confused?”

“Bit.” Harry breathes out, wishing it were just a bit colder so he could see it solidify on the air. He hates winter, until it’s gone; then he misses it and can’t wait for it to come back. “Annie said she gave you a big break.” 

“She did. You heard of Plastic Jesus?” 

“Seen flyers for it. Thought that was like a club night, though?”

“It is. Started here,” Nick says, pointing down into the city. “Was almost fifteen when I started clubbing. Used to sneak in to see Annie DJ and she knew I was underage so she offered me a job handing out flyers to make me seem like I belonged. Did everything, soon enough – designed those fucking flyers, stood outside in the rain and handed them out, hung the glitter curtain, wired the PA, got punched in the face by dickheads who thought they should be on the guest list. She taught me to DJ, gave me the back room for my eighteenth even though I was shite. I’d book big names, thought I’d sweet-talked them into doing it for less than their usual fee – then I’d pretend to be them when they inevitably didn’t show. In my time I’ve impersonated everyone from Felix da Housecat to DJ Rap.” He looks over at Harry and when Harry mugs non-recognition, Nick leans in, fake conspiratorial. “One’s got a huge afro and the other’s a woman. Didn’t say I was convincing.” He pauses just long enough for Harry to smile. “Most people thought it was funny, liked the tease of it, like ‘Is this the week David Morales will actually show up?’ Some people really didn’t. Still got a scar from when Danny Howells stood me up and someone bounced a bottle of WKD off my head. Blue one and all. Hoodie stank of it. I had to throw it out. I was more cut up about that than the concussion.” 

Sniffing, Harry pokes a toe between the wrought iron curls. “You still do it?”

“Night still happens. It’s a thing, now – Frankie Knuckles might be on the flyer but only I know if he’s actually been properly booked. Some nights you’ll show up and it’ll be a chancer who can barely keep the beats from galloping. Some nights there’s no one of note on the flyer and A-Trak comes out in his hat.”

“Is it at that Manto you were on about?”

“Fuck off, as if – I should buy that place just to shut it down and save the world from its musical crimes. _Is it at Manto_ , Jesus, what do I look like?” 

Rolling his eyes, Nick runs his thumb along the balustrade and shifts his weight. 

“Never been clubbing,” Harry says. 

“You are – ” Nick swallows, rubs at his chin. “You are old enough to? You’re not – ”

“I’m nineteen, don’t panic.” 

Nick softens, dipping a hip. “That’s just tragic, then. Hair like yours was made for disco lights. For the record I own the warehouse all the cool kids go to on a Friday. Does the odd gig other nights. We’ve got TEED tonight.” Meeting Harry’s blank expression, Nick lapses into a weary smile. “That would be a thing to nod your head knowingly at.”

Harry turns to rest on the bannister, hooking his thumbs through the metal and leaning back. “Must be doing pretty well for you to afford this.” 

“Does all right. Got another club in Leeds,” Nick says, on a sigh, “one in Liverpool – two in London – Ibiza in the summer, obviously, small place in Paris that’s still almost cool. Record label side of things, we put out a compilation every quarter of what’s hot, get someone moderately famous to mix it, rejig it at Christmas to sell as a two CD stocking filler – you know, the kind your aunt buys when she doesn’t know what to get you but young people have it in their hand at the checkout. Doing a festival that’s already sold out. Other than that, make a few quid selling t-shirts with the logo on to pill heads who are still impressed by things that glow in the dark.”

“Real business empire.” Holy shit. No wonder he never has to ask the price of anything. “And Annie’s just got a record label now?”

“It’s not just _a_ record label. It’s _the_ fucking record label and you obviously don’t know who the fuck she is, so I’ll spell it out – any night, any night you want with just the CDs she happens to have in her glove box, she’ll play you a set to rival any DJ in the world. Once I saw Grandmaster Flash get actually nervous about going on after her. Grandmaster Flash! He’s so cool he can shout out to Stoke-on-Trent then drop the Eurhythmics, and have everyone scream like he hasn’t just channelled some dodgy geezer on the dodgems.”

It’s the most animated Harry’s seen him be about anything other than his hatred of olives. Weirdly it makes Harry want to pat him on the head.

“Oh, I see. You don’t really want to buy her record label, you just want her to be impressed that you could.”

Nick sags over the banister with a laugh that has more than a tinge of groan in it. “Oh god save me from boys who think they understand people because they’ve watched Jeremy Kyle.” 

He looks over, shaking his head, but his eyes are amused, and Harry wants to ask him everything about all these people and his past but there’s a prim _rat-a-taaa_ on the door. 

“I had Ben get use ice cream.”

After a quick thanks and a goodnight with Ben, Harry brings back a tub of vanilla Häagen-Dazs with the lid off, two spoons, and chocolate shavings on the top. Too late he realises this was sort of a favour.

“Oh, shit, should I have done that thing people do in films where you fold a tenner up in your hand and shake? I didn’t – ” He looks back towards the door, frowning in case Ben thinks he’s been dissed. 

“It’s covered.”

Harry doesn’t ask what he means because Nick smiles like there’s no debate to be had. 

“This all right?”

Harry nudges Nick’s arm with the tub before sitting down, back to the wall, sliding his phone out of his pocket to chirrup between them. Nick makes a meal of joining him, mumbling that there’s a perfectly good sofa, and crossing his ankles so his trouser legs ride up to show off socks in the same shade of purple as the lining of his jacket. From here the city’s mostly sky and Harry wonders what it’d be like to sit out until the sun came up, if he’d be able to tell the exact moment the city starts to wake. Rolling the squidgy sides between his palms, he watches the ice cream around the perimeter turn thin and creamy, pressing the tip of his spoon in and leaving a crescent where it’s still hard. 

“God, this sounds like Giorgio Moroder in a blender,” Nick says, with a wave at Harry’s phone.

“That’s mean. Someone devoted forty minutes of their life to writing this.”

Nick’s laugh comes out like someone’s punched him in the back of his head. He’s cute when he does that and feeling rather pleased to be the cause of it, Harry snuggles into his arm.

“What kind of music do you like?”

“Both kinds,” Nick says. Harry bites at his shoulder. “Ow, you – ” Harry mouths at his shirt like he’s going to do it again, grinning up at him. “House and deep Chicago house, then.”

“What’s the difference?” 

“House,” Nick says, smiling to himself, “is the noise your soul makes when you wake up in love but out of aspirin. Deep Chicago house is when you cure that by pounding a bottle of Pepsi and decide disco wasn’t that bad after all.” 

Long fingers brush over Harry’s hand as Nick takes the spoon. “Is it done yet?” he says, and scrapes at the top of the ice cream.

“Nope. You’re going to have to explain it to me more.”

Nick takes his time about it, which is different, because usually the words are in a race to get out of his mouth. “Started in your precious eighties, people mixing bits of disco, funk, soul, stuff you can dance to – ”

Harry rests his chin on Nick’s shoulder, toying with his cuff, not so much listening to the words but letting the way he talks sink in. He picks up Ibiza and baggy, crossover and techno, something about salad and illegal raves. When he stops, Nick seems softer than he did and Harry smiles at him, unsure if he’s been talking for a minute or an hour.

“How about now?” Nick says, taking the spoon again. The ice cream wrinkles against the metal like a crinkle crisp. 

“Let’s eat it anyway.”

Nick holds the spoon out rather than going for what he’s scooped himself. Harry mouths around it, closing his eyes. He hasn’t had fancy ice cream since – 

“Ugh, it’s good.”

He emerges from his eyelids to find Nick sucking on the spoon, tongue flat to the metal. It slips from his lips making a noise like a kiss and Harry wonders if Nick can taste his mouth in the creamy streaks. The thought goes straight to his dick and he shifts a bit closer to take the spoon back, shuffling until his arse nestles against the hand Nick’s using to prop himself up. They feed each other a couple of mouthfuls but when Harry gets the last of the chocolate shavings on the spoon, he feeds it into his mouth, smiling around it as he meets Nick’s eye, accentuating the stretch the spoon causes his lips.

“You got any moves that aren’t blowjob food related?” Nick says.

“You saying it’s not working?”

Nick ducks his head to hide a grin, and Harry thinks about all the balcony’s possibilities. Al fresco’s nothing new but doing it up here in a hotel with more stars than rooms on the floor definitely would be. He bounces the spoon off his lip, eyes Nick’s crotch.

“Could blow you right here with ice cream in my mouth, wind tickling through your hair… be nice. Maybe if we timed it right, could have you jizzing right out into Picca – ”

“Oh god.” Nick gets to his feet, fumbling for Harry’s collar and tugging it to make him get up, which he does, laughing. “I am taking you to bed before you cause a traffic incident.”

He leads the way through the suite, unbuttoning his waistcoat as he goes. 

“Want me to bring the ice cream?” Harry says. “Or you feel the same way about that as toast?”

“Bring it, if you want, but I’m not sleeping in the sticky patch.”

The shirt he’s been unbuttoning hits the chair in the corner, his trousers and his boxers following. Nick gets into bed, hooking one leg over the duvet and leaning back against the pillows. Harry wonders if he should tell him he looks quite a lot like Serena Vanderwhatsit. Except with an entirely different face and body. It’s mostly an aura thing. And that he wouldn’t mind having either of them sit on his face.

“On or off?” Harry says.

“Off. That’s too nice a suit to get mucky.”

“Lights, I meant.”

“No preference.”

Harry tugs off his clothes, trying to strike the right balance between nonplussed and efficient, hangering the shirt and folding the trousers, not risking opening the wardrobe too far in case Nick sees inside to the lack of items he bought. Harry flicks the switch to darken the room and puts the ice cream, his phone, and a couple of condoms he’s had pocketed all night on the bedside table. He lifts up the heavy duvet to get in, wriggles over to where Nick is, misjudges it because his eyes aren’t quite used to the dark and bumps into him. He makes a tiny startled noise and Nick mutters, “Suave.”

“That’s my other move,” he murmurs. “Lack of spatial awareness. People go crazy for it.”

“I bet.”

Turning into him, Nick cradles his neck, thumb under his jaw. Harry thinks he’s going to kiss him, turns his head into his hand and away from his mouth, but if Nick was aiming for that, he doesn’t push it, just kisses Harry’s neck. His mouth’s warm and persuasive, kisses big with just a hint of tongue, and Harry thinks if he were the kind of boy who were vulnerable to being seduced, this would well and truly be working. With a mini moan, he settles on the pillows, drawing Nick with him until he’s mostly on top. He’s not that heavy but his long limbs make him feel all encompassing. 

Harry runs his fingers through his hair, trying not to shiver when Nick nips that spot halfway to his ear that makes his spine try to move eight inches to the left without the rest of him. 

The duvet rustles like a wheat field under a breeze as they shift together, Nick getting hard grinding on his hip. He anchors Nick in place with a foot hooked behind his knee, presses their cheeks together, scent of whatever he uses to make his hair stand proud clean and fruity as he slots into the v of Harry’s legs. Missionary? Novel. 

Nick runs a hand over Harry’s leg to bring it up, strokes his thigh, where hip turns to arse. He dawdles there for a moment, kneading – between last night, this, and catching him looking a couple of times, Harry’s getting the impression he’s definitely an arse man – before his fingers slip down between them. Harry obligingly parts his legs more so Nick can get a finger on him, wonders if Nick’s the sort to like ankles crossed behind his head or to hold his knees apart. He’ll feel either tomorrow; tossup, really, what’s worse, sore hamstrings or inner thighs.

“W – ” Finding him wet, Nick hesitates. “You spend all day every day lubed up and ready to go?”

“Some guys don’t, you know, care about that.” Harry reaches down for Nick’s wrist, pushes his fingers back where they were. “But if you’re into doing it, you can.” He searches out Nick’s eyes in the dark. “I don’t mind.”

“But do you pretend not mind because you think I’m into it or really not mind?”

Harry wriggles underneath him. “See if you can tell.”

Nick’s Adam’s apple bobs in uncertainty, but he must be curious because he leans back on his knees for a proper look. His thumb slides around Harry’s arse before latching on, pushing in.

“Oh,” Harry whispers. He gulps for a breath, closes his eyes, throwing his throat up and out as the thumb goes deeper. “God, oh god that’s so good.”

He opens his eyes and throws Nick a cheeky grin. 

Above him, Nick huffs, but he carries on fucking him with his fingers – not a token effort, Harry’s had enough of those to tell, as if he’s actually meaning it – which is what Harry thinks people mean by _character_ : he’s a person who carries on his intended course of doing what he thinks is right, even when people are making fun of him. 

Harry can’t resist it, because he has character too and he intended to take the piss so he should do it properly. He changes the way he’s moving, slackens his hip as if his body’s responding when he didn’t intend it too, goes extra breathy, throws in clinging to Nick’s shoulder, pawing at the back of his leg with his heel. He thinks Nick’s probably buying it until Harry turns into the forearm Nick’s dropped by his head as if he’s actually about to lose it like some fourteen year old and groans, “Don’t stop, love. Pleeeaase don’t stop. Think I’m gonna – ”

“I’ve half a mind to roll you over and stuff a pillow in your mouth.”

“Ohhhh,” Harry says, writhing against him like a cat in heat. “Now we’re talking.”

The retreat of Nick’s fingers and slap on the thigh is probably supposed to be admonishing, but the effort’s somewhat dented by his fingers being slippery enough to just slide off.

“Fine,” Nick mutters, and then he’s rolling onto his back, dragging Harry with him. “You can do all the work, but don’t say I didn’t offer.”

Straddling his thighs, almost overbalancing because he’s doing a little victory dance, Harry reaches for a condom. He works it down and rearranges so Nick’s dick is between his cheeks, holding it there with the flat of his palm while he shifts up and down a few times. Be better if Nick could see but it feels nice, the easy slide of it, and if Nick was ever really pissed off with him, Harry makes him forget it, pinches his nipples and has him balling a fist in the sheets, watching all twitchy with anticipation as Harry arches his back.

“You do like to show off.”

“You’ve no idea.”

Leaning forward, Harry manoeuvres the head of Nick’s dick to his hole. Takes him a couple of tries to get more than just the tip in – wouldn’t have used this much lube if he’d known he’d definitely be in charge – but when he sinks onto it, he manages to be almost graceful. He trails his fingers down Nick’s stomach and over the line of his hip as it disappears beneath his thigh. 

Nick’s eyes slide closed and his lips part. 

Harry takes it slow at first, just rocks until he’s comfy, building to lifting himself up and dropping back down, fingers ready to catch if Nick slides out. 

Rolling his hips up to meet him, Nick groans, reaching behind his head to hang on to the pillow. Harry takes it a bit faster, then, until he’s breathing hard to keep up, leaning back to cling to Nick’s thigh. He throws his head back and trails his fingers down his body in case Nick looks, but he’s not.

He looks so lost in it, Harry can’t resist. Making it seem as if he’s leaning in to hold onto the headboard for leverage, he reaches for the ice cream, biting his lip as he upends it over Nick’s chest.

*

_Most of them, they make their excuses early: don’t normally do this sort of thing, just too busy to meet someone, guys my age are all about commitment and I just want to fuck. Never really cared about hearing it until you didn’t offer any of that up, left me wondering who you were and why you were alone in a bar, not texting any of the people who’d have come to keep you company-slash-fucked your brains out if you’d asked._

_Closest you came to explaining was when you had a red wine smile painted on and we were debating whether 'downpayment' is one or two words. You bowed to my superior knowledge, given my line of work, then you asked me:_

_“Would you do that for someone who’s really hard up? Let them pay a deposit then chip away at the rest? With interest of course. You're smart.”_

_“Never come up,” I said. “I mean, if someone can’t afford to pay what I’ve asked for, not sure sex is their priority. Be too busy worrying about their bills, wouldn’t they?”_

_“Not just about the sex though, is it?” you said. “If all you wanted was to get off you’d have a wank with your laptop for company and call it a night.”_

_Pretended to be casual when I asked, “What is it about, then?”_

_I didn’t pull it off, because you smiled like a six-foot high fence had gone up and said, “That’d be telling. You want another glass?”_

*

It’s early when Nick stirs next to him, that early you feel in your eyeballs, the kind that makes you nauseous when you realise you haven’t slept and it’s early, now, so you’re probably not going to. Harry thought he was over his insomnia phase and he tries to breathe low and quiet, always a bit embarrassed about his inability to do something as basic as nod off when he’s supposed to.

“You awake?” 

It’s more a sleepy grumble than anything so Harry just hums in reply.

“Why?” Nick’s eyelids flutter, then come up, and in the goose down light he looks sort of pretty, like someone in a black and white film, the rake who got all rumpled by a caper with a girl. Except not a girl, in his case, probably. 

Harry runs his knuckles over the sheet, saying, “Good bed. Wanted to enjoy it.” 

It’s not a lie about the bed. They’ve fucked on it twice now and it’s the perfect host: the covers are so heavy they stay where they’re supposed to instead of riding up into a nest. 

Not that he’s anything against that. He likes a duvet nest, especially when Niall makes one in the lounge on a Sunday and they agree to do nothing but watch whatever’s on in their pyjamas, taking it in turns to make tea and fetch biscuits. 

“It does live in the Fabulous Suite,” Nick murmurs, eyes slipping closed again. 

“That’s what the room’s called?”

“Hmm?”

He’s drifting off again. Harry should probably let him but he’s had a nice night, all in: dinner, new people, melted ice cream fight-come-shag followed by something more traditional with his knees pinned to his chest. That makes the dull weight of the non-existent suit bags in the wardrobe heavier. He hugs the pillow to his cheek, figuring Nick’ll be too tired at least to kick him out, that maybe if he says it real fast it’ll sound less bad. “About lunch,” he whispers. “I can’t have it with you later. Nothing to wear.” 

As Nick’s eyes open more definitively, Harry shifts, balling up the pillowcase to cling to. “The suit, I didn’t buy it, it’s – ”

“Fucking hell, did you lift it? Why would you when I gave – ”

“I didn’t steal anything, it’s _rented_ and I paid for it with my own money because that’s not what you said to use your card for.”

Harry sits up, pulling his knees towards him so he can wrap his arm around them and hold them to quiet the beating of his heart, which has gone all nervous, flighty yet indignant, like he’s doing an exam and he can’t even work out how many essays he’s supposed to write but he’s sure it’s the question’s fault for not just putting a big number with an arrow. 

“Sorry, assumed – ”

“Yeah, and thanks for that. I’ve never stolen anything in my life.” Harry rolls his eyes, coming up short on a memory. “Other than – erm – I downloaded a film. A few films. Porn. Short ones. But I paid for that later – not with money because I couldn’t find them again, so I made a video – ” Nick’s eyes go really wide. “ – just me on my own and you couldn’t see my face. Thought it was, you know, giving back to the community?”

“How’s the suit involved in this?” Nick runs his hand over his jaw, scratching his stubble as he lifts up onto his elbow, hair like a cockatoo. “Christ, you didn’t make porn in here, did you?”

“No. Like, years ago.” Harry waves him off and Nick waits, brow getting progressively more shar pei-esque as his eyebrows lift. 

“How did you not buy a suit, then?”

“Oh. The people in the shop they – they – ” Harry frowns as he tries to remember what it was like so he can get the right word, wanting to accuse them of the correct thing, but it’s too recent to really see, all pixelated like he’s sitting too close to the screen at the cinema. “ – they weren’t very nice to me.” 

“How’d you mean?”

Nick’s watching him as if he’s really invested in a reality show, eyes all glinty in the dark. 

“Couldn’t work the door, and when I did, I kind of fell into a mannequin? This guy came over. Thought he was going to see if I was all right, but – ” 

He remembers the guy’s face, taut and beige, eyebrows immaculate, the way he sniffed and adjusted the shoulders of the thing’s jacket, correcting a miniscule defect in its positioning. 

Harry said, “These are nice,” to break the ice, getting by way of reply: 

“I’ll be sure to pass your kind words onto Mr Boss. He’s very new to all this. It’ll give him such a lift.”

He can hear the laughter of the girl in the heels at the till, feel the tightness in his throat, the sudden rush of heat over the hairs on his arms as they looked him up and down. Harry swallows. 

“Basically they threw me out,” he says. “Not physically but with, like, the way they were? Tried to show them your credit card to prove I could pay but I got tangled in my phone and they told me to go to Primark.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Tried to go next door to that place with the wood in the window, but I could tell they were watching me and laughing and I thought – well, they could’ve got your name off the card and what if I got you on some kind of black list?” He picks at the duvet, scrunching his toes down into the mattress. “Tried to call Niall, but he didn’t answer, and I panicked and came back here but I couldn’t work the door to the room. Bad day for me and doors. Threw a tantrum – well, the key card thingy, but I picked it up straight away because I had the littering squirrel in my h – ”

“The what?”

“From school.” Harry closes his eyes to find the song, hums half a line before he remembers the words, singing, “ – _join the pick up club, get a little badge to wear. Don’t just toss it down, show us that you care_.”

Nick blinks at him and rubs at his forehead as if he’s got a hangover.

“You didn’t have that? Was cool. And a bit scary, especially the chewing gum part,” Harry says. “Ben found me on the carpet – he was really nice. He sorted me out because he thinks I’m your personal assistant.” Harry breathes out, looking at the window. They’re so high up they don’t even have to draw the curtains. “Well, I don’t think he does really but he’s pretending because he thinks I’d be embarrassed by the truth. Or that you would. Asked him if you’d be angry – that’s what upset me, really, because you’d been so nice and – he just gave me a whole box of tissues even though I only needed one – two at most – and told me everything would be all right. Isn’t it weird how the people who look snooty and posh never are and people you think are more on your level because they work in a shop, they treat you like – ”

Nick reaches for his elbow, hooking his fingers into its crease. “Come here, you.”

Harry goes with the pressure and ends up with his cheek on Nick’s chest, hair scratchy against his skin. He’s bigger than Niall, and where he’s all Lynx, Nick’s like an expensive cake shop.

“Like your shower gel.”

Ruffling his hair, Nick tightens his grip. “You all right?”

Harry’s eyes cross as he focuses on Nick’s nipple and the way it rises and falls as he breathes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Harry fits his fingers to Nick’s ribs, trying to decide whether or not they match and if it means something, either way, or if his fingers would fit or not fit anybody because everyone’s the same. How has he never tried to do this to someone before?

“Could borrow something of yours, for lunch,” he says. “Shirts’d probably fit, mostly.”

Nick nudges his nose into Harry’s hair, lips resting there in a not-quite kiss, arm staying around him until Harry can’t remember what it was like not to feel a bit sweaty.

*

“Oh, you’re up. Put some clothes on. Meeting cancelled.”

Harry blinks at Nick, working the sleep out of his eyes with the back of his wrist.

“Chop chop.” Nick shoos him towards the bedroom before Harry’s even really finished leaving it. “Borrow one of me jumpers as well as a t-shirt. It’s cold.”

Taking a stumbling step, Harry turns, catches a glimpse of Nick in the mirror. He looks odd. Or maybe not odd, just different. Really, really different. His legs are – there’s, like, a lot of them.

“You’re wearing jeans.”

“Well spotted. Care to join me?”

Harry eyes them. They’re tight like orange peel and he definitely won’t fit in them too even if they’re 30% elastin. Nick must guess what he’s thinking because he balls up Harry’s jeans and throws them into his face. 

“Ow,” Harry says, catching them way too late.

Sluggish of thought and movement, he pulls them up his thighs, meets Nick’s hands, a t-shirt and a jumper as he straightens. The jumper’s black and red and the kind of soft that makes advert babies snuggle into blankets. Harry makes a meal of getting his arms and head through the right hole while Nick mutters about him being a slow poke and tugs on a leather jacket. 

“Breakfast when we get there, all right?”

“Yeah. That’d be nice. Pretty hungry, actually.” Harry lets himself be manhandled out the door to the lift. “Er – where are we going?”

“I’m taking you shopping.”

 

It’s not shopping. Shopping is what Harry used to do with his mates: walk around the town centre on a Saturday weighing the merits of Halo against those trainers everyone wants and taking a carrier bag full of potatoes to the shin every now and then. This – this is some world where everything is white except the paper bags and nametags, which are both in the plentiful supply and yellow. He dodges through a minefield of people spritzing perfume, trailing after Nick as he strides through the counters like they’re parting in front of Moses. They emerge into menswear, a mannequin in Burberry standing archly against the wall in a pink tie. 

Harry runs his fingers down a display of neatly folded shirts, trying to ignore the _thumpa-thumpa-thumpa_ in his eardrums that lets him know his heart’s not really happy about being this close to designer clobber again after what happened last time. He peeks up through his fringe looking for assistants wearing blank sneers, but the guy behind the desk looks like a surfer – or a model for expensive surf ware at least – and all he does is toss over an Australian, “You looking for something specific?”

Snatching his fingers up into his armpit, Harry shakes his head, but at the same time Nick says:

“Be a poppet and tell Karen her ten o’clock’s here?” 

Karen, it transpires, is the kind of woman who’s barely five feet tall but adds a foot to her height in hairspray and attitude. She greets Nick with a hug-come-headbutt to the nipple and a cheery, “Wotcha Grimmy,” as she squeezes his arse.

“Eh, handsy.”

Nick leaps away with a mock offended swat at the air. 

“Who’s this, then? Yours or did you bring him for me as a gift?”

Harry meets Nick’s eye over her head and lifts an eyebrow. Nick ignores the question in favour of bustling them both into the sofa display.

Or that’s what Harry thinks it is at first because of the white settees and a coffee table with a stack of _Vogue_ s and _GQ_ s on. He notices, though, a doored-off area to get naked in taking up one corner. Maybe that’s what money buys you: extra lounges wherever you go. He should check the toilets in the restaurant at the hotel to see if there’s one in there or ask Niall to ask Simon how many he has in his house, whether there’s a lounge and a sitting room and a parlour and maybe even something he calls his ‘downtime zone’ specifically because he’s run out of words that mean ‘room with a settee in’. 

“ – and something Henry won’t tut at.” Nick steers Harry towards one of the sofas and pushes him down, smiling at him with this: _you weren’t listening at all, were you?_

Nick drops down on the next cushion, reaching for _GQ_. “God, his torso is everywhere,” Nick says, and flips the cover over with a sniff. “Wonder if he’d be doing so well for himself if everyone knew that waistline was sponsored by Adderall.”

Over the next twenty minutes, Harry learns the following things:

> 1\. Nick can’t read a magazine without giving a running commentary and offering up pictures for inspection before taking the thing back too quickly for Harry to properly take in what he’s supposed to be looking at.
> 
> 2\. This weird new definition of shopping doesn’t include browsing the actual shop.
> 
> 3\. It’s hard to drink chamomile tea and eat tiny dainty cakes while expressing an opinion you’re formulating on the spot about whether you’re more a warm or cold grey person. 
> 
> 4\. Apparently people have tea and cake for breakfast in Selfridges. 

“Thought we’d take the temperature with this,” Karen says, unhooking a jacket from the railing she and surfer guy wheeled in that’s rammed with selections in Harry’s size – she measured him with a whizzing yellow tape measure that auto-retracts. It was… weird.

“Oh, ok.” Harry goes to stand, noticing a line of lemon cake crumbs in his crotch. “Sh – ” Harry brushes at his lap, making them cling all the tighter to Nick’s jumper, looking around for a bin he might be able to crab walk over to and brush himself off into. 

“Don’t be shy.”

Karen grabs his hand, pulls him up, divests him of Nick’s jumper like a pro – which, he supposes, she is – and wheels him towards the mirror, making sure his arms are somehow in the jacket’s sleeves by the time he gets there. She tugs the shoulders into place and smooths them with her palms. “Urgh, no, off.” 

“What? It’s – ”

“Don’t argue with her, Harry,” Nick says, sipping his tea and flipping a page. “Last client who did that ended up on a red carpet wearing something that resembled an explosion of cherry tomatoes.”

“That was Westwood, Grim.”

“Tim or Vivien?” 

The next three jackets get dismissive tuts even though Harry thinks each and every one of them look really nice and tries to say so – but the fourth is a heavy weave browny grey with orange threads running thin lines through and Karen likes that enough to march Harry to the door and hand him the trousers and a shirt. 

The door closes with a click. It’s not so much a changing room as one you could put a bed in – bigger than his and Niall’s kitchen at least. Harry slips into the clothes, leaving his own in a puddle in the corner, shaking out his hair as he stares at himself in the mirror. It doesn’t feel very real, so he takes a picture of his reflection with his phone and posts it: _suits you sir_.

They’re talking outside; Harry wonders if he should knock before he emerges to let them know he’s coming in case either of them is about to say something embarrassing or private, but he can’t quite make his knuckles do it so he settles for a cough and peeks around the door before stepping out, making a game showish _ta dah_ with his hands.

“Oh, yes. Very dapper,” Karen says, gripping her hands together and inverting her elbow like a six year old. “Grimmy?”

Nick looks up from his phone and lifts an eyebrow, tilting his head to consider the suit. He points up, circles his finger, and Harry turns around, unsure what to do with his hands, whether he should throw them out for balance or tuck them into the pockets. Consequently he flits between the two and probably looks like a drunk tap dancing in the bus station at midnight. Nick hums and does it again. Harry spins a bit faster, shifting his weight onto his heels.

“And again? You know I’m not sure the cut’s – ”

Harry twirls, mirror and the sofa and Nick going woozy and melting into each other. Still, he manages to pick out Nick motioning for him not to stop and he spins, eyeballs going heavy and weird in his sockets until he has to come to a halt, head listing. 

“Oh god, if you don’t like it, can I just take it off?”

“You look perfect. Just wanted to see if I could make you dizzy.”

The coat hanger Harry lobs at him misses him by inches but Nick grins at him, sticking his tongue out. Harry makes the same face back and Karen says something about a coat that would be perfect and scampers off on her artfully distressed trainers. 

Weaving just a little, Harry goes over, knocks Nick’s knee with his. He means to say, ‘You total bastard,’ but by the time it comes out of his mouth, it’s turned into: 

“You really like it?”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.” Harry shifts inside the sleeves, feeling the cool, smooth lining slide over the shirt, the way that sits on his wrists at the right length, in direct contrast to the last shirts he wore. He’d always have to roll them up at the sleeve so no one could see that they were too long because his arms were too short and then too short because his limbs sprouted without him noticing. “Feels nice. Really nice.” 

Catching Nick looking at him, intent, Harry drops into his lap, one knee on either side of his hips, hands on his shoulders for balance. It’s a pretty good echo of last night, before, that is, Nick abandoned licking ice cream off his collarbones and pushed him back so he could watch Harry’s dick bounce off his stomach. 

The breath Harry lets out sounds more porny than he intended.

Nick’s glance is warning – Harry ignores it, letting his tongue peek through his lips as he slides his fingers down his neck. “Gonna have to figure out a way to say thank you.”

“Actual words not good enough?”

“The shirt fits perfectly, Nick.”

He walks his fingers down Nick’s t-shirt, tugging it up, searching for the thicker denim of his fly. Nick shifts enough to let him carry on, hands sliding up his thighs, even though a reluctant noise pushes out of his mouth. Harry skirts the warm crease between his legs, traces up over the denimed curve of his crotch, squashing their bodies together, his teeth just meeting the meat of Nick’s neck when Karen comes back in brandishing a coat.

“And this I think – oh, sorry.”

Harry hides his face in Nick’s shoulder, laughing into the cool, musty leather.

“It’s the chamomile,” Nick says, patting the small of his back. “He’s a contrary sort so it makes him excited.”

 

When they finally fall out of the shop it’s with an entire wardrobe stowed in yellow bags. Kicking against his leg as he walks, Harry has shoes and underwear, patterned shirts and plain tees in several colours, a pair of pyjama bottoms in garish pink and black check, and a set of cufflinks shaped like Love Hearts that Nick said were too tacky not to buy. His suits are being adjusted, then delivered, and he’s also wearing something Nick picked out for him – jeans that cling like his old ones but are yet to have all the colour sucked out, a bomber jacket with a sheepskin collar, and an old rock n’roll t shirt from Gary Numan’s tour in 1987 that cost more than a ticket to Wembley would. Oddly he feels more like himself than he has since he left home. Looks it too, when he catches a glimpse of himself reflected in a shop front, and he smiles until – 

“Oh, oh fuck.”

His feet stick to the pavement as if they’ve suddenly walked through an entire city’s worth of chewing gum.

“What?”

Harry points at the shop, where clicky heels and the sweater teaser are fussing with a window display of new season shirts. “That’s – they’re – ” 

“That them?”

“Yeah – can we just go before they see?” 

Harry’s pleading eyes apparently aren't up to much because Nick strides over and raps on the glass with his knuckles. “Hey you, perma-tan. And you, cankles.”

Clicky heels turns to stare, nostrils flaring. Her hair is fixed into a shape like a flower over her ear. Fluttering around her, the guy looks a bit like a Pixar wasp. Harry always hated them.

Nick flails, waving at Harry and all the bags he's carrying. Behind the glass, their faces go from startled to placing him to open-mouthed. 

Nick flips them off.

“Snooty fuckers,” he mutters, slinging an arm around Harry’s shoulders and dragging him down the pavement. “I’m starving. You fancy sushi for lunch?” 

“Sure. Then do you mind if we go to a stationary shop?”

“I got to get to Annie’s for a meeting, but you go – get anything you want and show me later. Anyone tries to give you gyp over the Pritt Stick you know what to do,” he says, and kisses Harry noisily on the ear.

*

_I’ve always liked being part of a gang. One of the things I like about you is you made me feel like I was in yours, even when it was just the two of us._

_Had the boys over, one day, as if any of the Fabulous Suite was mine to show off._

_Zayn got a proper art boner for the paintings. Louis bounced on the bed and brained himself on the ceiling, karma for saying, “You do your best work here, Styles? Least it’s nice and soft under your knees, eh?” Liam ate a lot of grapes and talked about how clean it was and Niall, Niall was outside with Ben, mostly, asking him questions about his hours and how much he earns. Probably should’ve apologised for that._

_Took them for pizza. Gourmet place where they do roast spuds and wild boar as a topping._

_“Trust you to get a sugar daddy,” Louis said, tearing apart his crust. “Is he really old and gross? You close your eyes and pretend he’s Hugh Jackman?”_

_“No, he’s – ”_

_“Bet he’s one of those guys who looks like a cocktail sausage, all brown and wrinkly with too much sunbathing in his youth.”_

_Liam chipped in: “Balls like Scotch Eggs.”_

_“Yeah right. Those cheap ones where the filling’s so small it rattles inside its little sack.”_

_I told them you were nice, took me shopping etc., but Louis can twist anything – he’s really quick like that – so he just asked if that was because you got Denture Fix on my kecks and all I could think to say was:_

_“His teeth are real, actually.”_

_Early indications suggest they’re going to be doing impressions of me saying that forever, like, clutching their chest as if they’re mortally wounded. “How dare you. His teeth are real.”_

_Pretty funny, actually. Was nice to have a day like that, because people stop being themselves when they’re trying to decide what’s more important: food or being able to feel their toes in the morning._

*

Parties in Nick’s world bear as little resemblance to parties in Harry’s as his shopping does to nipping down the market. There’s no cheap cider and crisps in four colours of orange, and Harry has no idea what to do if it’s not getting off with whoever wants him to a soundtrack of whatever indie is surging up the chart. Nick waves his hands like he doesn’t fit either and mutters about a _silly fashion thing, really, here for a pal_ but somehow he knows the name of every person along with little details to murmur into Harry’s ear. “Apparently she’s the new face of Dior,” or “He’s got a really weird tattoo on his arse. Looks like a flamingo wearing a top hat.”

Closest Harry’s come to this is a party at Simon’s Niall took him to: vodka bought by people who really cared about the name on the label and the odd line of powder laid out on the table. At first, he’d thought it was actually sherbet and dipped his finger in it. Several times. And when he got the mother of all sugar rushes an hour later and figured whoa, probably not sherbet after all, he went back because it was kind of nice to feel that happy for no reason. Some girl with pink dip-dye was snorting it through a twenty so he did too, and he did a fat enough line – maybe more than one, maybe with more than one girl, to be honest the details are a tad fuzzy when he tries to think directly about them – that apparently he talked to everyone about astrology and ran naked through the pond. He woke up with a new tattoo and a respiratory system that felt as if it had been pumped full of someone else’s snot. 

Niall had laughed for about a week, “It was the arse of Aquarius, you kept saying. You even sang the song.”

At least everyone else was too wasted to get it on video. Well, there was that one but it was really blurry. You could only tell it was Harry’s dick if you knew what to look for and he managed to hide most of his embarrassment by just muttering, “Hedonism, what?” whenever it did the rounds.

At his elbow, Nick hooks a couple of glasses of Champagne off a fancy buffet table. It’s the kind Harry imagines might sit at one end of the hall at a benevolent dictator’s funeral, there’s even a full-size glazed pig with an apple caught between its gnashers. 

“We don’t have to stay for long.”

Harry sips at his Champagne, bubbles going up his nose and burning the inside of it. He wrinkles up against it, shaking his head, and waves at Aimee across the room. She turns to nudge someone with a quiff and glasses to indicate Nick’s arrived, and they both come over.

The conversation isn’t one Harry can really get into – people he doesn’t know, places he hasn’t heard of, jokes he wasn’t there at the origin of – so he takes a picture of the buffet table and sends it to Niall with the words: _pigging out_.

While he’s got his phone open he thumbs through his messages, the ones he sent to Niall asking if he got the money Harry transferred for the bills lying unanswered in their little blue bubbles. He likes every photo that’s been posted in the last twelve hours even though one of them is of Louis’s corns, and he’s just about to check if anyone’s commented on his pig pic when the quiff guy leans past him to pluck a tiny orange from where it’s speared in a display.

“Bored already?” His name’s Henry – glasses an odd shape that shouldn’t suit anybody’s face and a three piece in four different florals like someone threw up a curtain factory all over him. “This is the most tedious party I’ve been to all week and given last night I stopped briefly at the Littlewoods catalogue do, that’s saying something. I should sack my party planner.”

“I dunno,” Harry says, pocketing his phone and lifting his glass. “Like the pig.”

“Hog, actually. The new range is called Don’t Hog The Limelight.”

“Oh, so – that’s why there’s all the citrus? You want people to meander in for a mandarin.”

Henry clutches his shirt over his heart. “ _Finally_ ,” he says, “someone gets it and praise be, is Grimmy actually interested in someone with an IQ bigger than his waist size?” Harry smiles at him, noting the way Nick shifts from foot to foot, gaze darting over, even though Aimee’s chattering away about _last night, man, should’ve been there. Annie was going off_. “Rather glad if I’m honest he brought a plus one. Tears on the runway, love, been there too many times courtesy of him.” 

He pats Harry’s arm, grabs another cocktail and walks right into an air kiss with a woman with a too tight forehead and a wooden necklace made of beads the size of the heads of small children. Harry looks around for someone friendly looking, but it’s been a while since he did this, spoke to strangers when he wasn’t looking to extract the contents of their wallet in return for orgasms. He can’t have forgotten how to do it, surely? He talks to Niall all the time.

“You’re new.” 

The voice at his ear is startling in being so close, and Harry hunches away, spilling Champagne down the side of his flute and over his fingers. The hot breath belongs to the blond with the cheeks like a slapped arse Nick got a call from. James? He’s grinning, although in a way that reminds Harry of something he saw on a nature documentary: one that didn’t end very well for some kind of small mammal. That’s probably how people become successful, eying everyone as if they’re catchable.

Harry extends his hand – the wrong one. “Oop – ” He switches his glass over and, not wanting to wipe Champagne all over the suit Nick bought him, he licks his fingers clean and retracts the gesture in favour of a smiled greeting instead. 

“So you’re the reason Grimmy’s been cancelling things left, right, and centre?” He squeezes Harry’s arm around the top and drags him away from the others, pinching his skin. “Understand it, now,” he says, eyes sweeping down Harry’s torso like he’s pulling the flesh from his bones with his teeth. “Still think you’re overpriced but you twinky fellas have always been his weakness. And who can blame him when you’re all so tight and eager to please? Or the latter at least in your case.”

Swallowing, Harry puts his glass down on the table so he can cross his arms over his chest. When he’s in a bar he’s encountered worse than this – had his arse groped by drunks and been shoved against walls and whispered to in tones the memory of which still make his spine want to crawl up out of his collar, but this guy’s wearing a suit that cost more than some people make in a month and he’s at a party in a bar so fancy they have a doily suitable for sitting underneath a whole pig. 

“Tell me,” James says, running a finger over the edge of Harry’s lapel and dampening his lips, “what exactly does he get for what he’s paying you?”

Looking over his shoulder for Nick, Harry presses his palms into the crooks of his elbows.

“Must be nice for him not to have to make any effort.” Touch falling down Harry’s sleeve, James looks up, keeps weaving back and forth, trying to make Harry look at him. “That part is always such a bore, don’t you think?”

He has a wedding ring. His cuticles are gnawed and red. Serial killers do that because the chemicals and latex gloves they use for scrubbing the scenes of their crime irritate the skin. He bets James drives a BMW, one of the ones with room in the boot for a full set of golf clubs. When he was laughing about his awful handicap with the salesman, he was probably thinking – just a little bit – that if he stuck to the reasonably small ones, that was plenty of room for a whore with a gag in their mouth. 

Harry really wishes Niall were here to tell him he’s been watching too much _CSI_. 

Keeping his eyes down on the ground even though all he can see is the guy’s belly and the hem of his own jacket flaring out between them, Harry replays the self-defence videos he watched over and over on YouTube after the first time things went badly with a punter. Stamp, knee, headbutt, stamp, knee, headbutt, try and distract them with something you’re saying first if they’re bigger so you’ve the element of surprise. 

“When he’s done with you, perhaps we could arrange something? I need a workout and I _really_ hate the gym.” 

Pudgy fingers draw patterns over the back of Harry’s hand. Bones recoiling inside, he wants desperately to wrench away, but unlike Niall’s or even Simon’s parties, Harry doesn’t know what the rules are, if Nick brought him here to be shared. The thought makes him feel a bit sick. Normally he knows it’s coming: there’s an awkward phone call from a maid of honour or a BFF; he gets to be charming and reassuring and set himself up a perimeter of control.

James pinches the back of his hand.

Not knowing what else to do, trying not to react to the pain, Harry nods, head more shaking vertically than agreeing.

“Nice when he brings a pretty one. These parties are awfully dull.” 

James trails his fingers over Harry’s arm and walks off, smiling a doughy hyena smile and leaving the taste of bile crawling up Harry’s throat.

*

“What’s eating you?”

In the back of the cab, Nick crosses his legs and regards Harry over the top of a cashmere scarf. They left early, Nick spotting Harry standing in the corner, chin wobbles somewhere down by his knees and all his effort invested in keeping them there rather than letting them migrate up to somewhere they could be seen. 

Rather than answering with something trite, ‘thought you were different’ etc., he traces the shape of a sad face through the fog on the window, condensation bead hovering at the corner of the thing’s downturned mouth like drool. 

“Not really in the mood to play Pictionary,” Nick says. 

Harry glances at the driver, but beyond the screen he’s jabbering into the earpiece for his phone. Harry should do something dramatic: tell him to stop the car, properly shout it, throw open the door and run out into the storm, leaving Nick sorry and puzzled with raindrops for teardrops on the reflection of his face.

Except it’s not raining, of course. He’ll have to wait, then, until they get back to the hotel: ditch the actual storm for a metaphorical pitter-patter of stomps around the room while he hurls his things into a bag and says he’s leaving. Maybe he could run the shower as a sound effect. 

Wait, has he got a bag? 

Will it have the same effect if he storms out with, like, an armful of clothes?

Nick leans in and at least he’s doing the puzzled part. “Henry said you were lovely and he’s no idea what you’re doing with me.”

Harry grits his teeth together. “You tell him I’m little more than a fashion accessory you get to stick your dick in, that you’ll lend me to him like a jacket when you’re bored of me?”

“What? Of course I – ” Nick leans away, and now he’s the one eying the driver. “Why would you think – ?”

“Probably told everyone they could have a go if they fancied. That’s what James thinks.”

“I never said anything to anyone.”

Meeting his eye, Harry digs his nails into his palm as he looks for any hint Nick’s lying. There is none and Nick sees something in Harry’s expression that makes him go from earnest to angry in a second. “What the fuck did he say to you? He didn’t – _do_ something?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Harry.”

His voice is sharp like a string of taut cotton. 

“Just – ” Harry switches seats to sit beside him, willingness to repeat it leaving him as he sinks back. “ – stuff.”

“You’re picking a real good moment to be coy.” Nick rearranges his scarf and shoots another look at the driver before lowering his voice. “Just tell me, on a scale of one to ten – ten being the worst you’ve ever felt – how bad?”

“Like a five and a half? Maybe almost a six?”

“You’re lying.” Nick sighs and uncurls the fingers that have been clasped around his phone, thumbing through his recent calls. He hits a button and mutters, “I used to find him amusing but he’s becoming a liability.”

“What you doing?”

“Ripping him a new one, what d’you think?”

Harry grabs his hand, dragging it away from Nick’s ear. “Don’t. I don’t want to cause a – ”

In Nick’s hand, James’s voice sounds. “Grimmy mate, why you calling? Shouldn’t you be balls deep in your little – ”

Nick hangs up and meets Harry’s eye. His lashes look especially long and Harry wonders if he has something done to them or if they just grow like that with no input. 

The quiet stretches like bubble gum – on and on and on and thinner and thinner until it breaks under its own weight.

“Henry doesn’t like anyone, not really,” Nick says. “Unusual for him to take to someone new. Annie and Aimee too, said the same.”

Unsure whether he’s still mad at Nick or not because his chest’s gone weird, Harry rubs his hands together and pulls his sleeves down over them. “Cold.”

Nick lifts his arm, smiles with cautious invitation. Harry worms his way under, rests his head against Nick’s shoulder. “I’ve been working in James’s office,” Nick murmurs. “Maybe I left my banking up when I nipped out for a fag. He likes to snoop. Has to, really, because it’s not like he gives off likeable, trustworthy vibes, is it?”

Harry nuzzles into the softness of his scarf and stays there, with Nick stroking through his hair, until they get back to the hotel. 

There, he puts his clothes away and waits for Nick by his side of the bed, wishing he could shift into the person he was the other night so he could stop picturing James’s hands pawing at his skin.

“What do you want tonight?” he says, to Nick’s freckly back as he takes off his watch, the last thing he’s wearing apart from his bangles, which Harry’s not sure he ever removes.

If he’s honest he’s hoping Nick’ll be in the mood to toss him down on something hard and solid or fuck him into the wall because he could use the distraction from the stuff in his head, but Nick’s been quiet since the cab. Harry slides in behind him, hands round his waist as he straightens up.

His eyes are closed, but when Harry kisses his shoulder, Nick says, “Talk to me.”

“You said you didn’t like – ”

Nick turns, mouth latching onto Harry’s neck. In rough snatches of kiss he makes his way to Harry’s ear, hand sliding down to his dick. “Curious,” he says. “Indulge me.” 

Swallowing, Harry presses his body right up against Nick’s, working his cock into his hand so he can pass it fattening up off as touch-related, rather than based in gruffness of voice and Nick’s hard mouth on his skin. 

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed,” Harry says, quiet and private right next to his ear, “what you like, who you are.”

While Nick works his dick – he’s a quick learner, knows exactly how Harry likes it, firm and direct, no teasing until after he’s come – he runs his nails from Nick’s sideburns over his scalp, back down his neck, scratching lightly, not hard enough to leave more than a fleeting trail of white but not soft enough that he won’t feel their impression burning under his skin. 

“You like a show. You like to show off, too. You want everyone to see you can get yourself pretty things.”

Nick headbutts Harry in the shoulder and he stays there, hand coming up to rest on Harry’s side, heavy but undemanding. 

“Models, apparently, rooms like this, clothes – ” Taking it as slow as his words, he moves along Nick’s collarbone, kissing and licking, sucking the skin there up into his mouth and barely resisting the urge to bite as hard as he can. “ – me. You like shiny trinkets.”

At the close of Harry’s teeth in the crook of his shoulder, Nick gasps, fingers tightening on Harry’s hip and yeah, maybe he bit harder than he should’ve but if Nick’s dick poking at him is anything to go by, he didn’t mind it.

“But you can’t quite let go, can you, of the idea you don’t deserve any of it.”

His voice has more of a snarl in it than he intended and Nick looks up. There’s something exposed about his expression, and Harry wants to cover the pinched line of his mouth with his, just so he’s too close to focus on. Instead he pushes him away towards the bed, watching him stumble and land on his arse. 

“Know what I think you’d really like?” Climbing up after him, Harry knee walks towards him over the duvet, straddling his legs, pushing him back and keeping him down with palms flat on his chest. “To have everybody watch us.”

Nick stares up, challenging, but his cock gives him away, jerking against Harry’s stomach. 

Ducking down, Harry licks around his nipple, blowing across it until it sits up and begs to be sucked. Pulling it into his mouth he grazes it with his teeth, hums around it as he slips off, raking his fingernails through Nick’s chest hair. 

“Reckon you’d like to take me to a party, but instead of having everybody see me on your arm – ” 

His blood’s _bdump-bdump-bdump_ ing inside his ears at the departure from his usual shtick, that instead of letting out a stream of generic but gets the job done filth about wanting it so hard he feels it for a week he’s just letting out the thoughts that have been solidifying in his head. He likes it more than he should, having Nick underneath him, neither of them knowing how far he’s going to push. 

“ – you want them to see me on your dick.”

Lowering himself to press down on his cock, Harry leaves a messy trail on Nick’s stomach and looks at him. His face is impassive but Harry doesn’t fall for it; below the surface he’s writhing, he can feel it, taste it almost in the flush under his skin. He wriggles down until the hard line of Nick’s dick is right next to his.

“We could, if you want.” He threads their fingers together and tugs Nick’s hands behind his head, making a pillow of them between the duvet and his hair. “Have all your friends over for a private show.”

He meets Nick’s eye and lifts an eyebrow, grinding just enough for them both to feel the friction, but it’s not enough, so parts his legs, bends his knees, lining them up either side of Nick, tucking his feet under his thighs. 

“Or maybe,” he says, arching into him, “we could make a video, send them a link, pretend it was an accident. You’d act all embarrassed, but you’d get a kick out of it, knowing they were lying when they said they hadn’t watched it.” 

Nick sucks in a stomachful of air and Harry presses harder, rocking against him. The way his nostrils flare in response is almost as heady as the feel of Nick’s dick, just sliding slightly, hot and smooth, against his. He’s got Nick pretty comprehensively pinned, can even feel his bangles pressing like a warm sliver into his own wrist, and he wonders if Nick’s picturing it: a rush of images based on grainy videos of headless amateurs going at it; all the faces they saw tonight turned on them as Harry shows them all his fanciest tricks.

“Does it for you, doesn’t it, doing something naughty, something most people wouldn’t dare. But you only ever flirt with it.” Nick shifts underneath him, trying to free his hands, and Harry smirks, squeezing to let him know it’s fruitless. “I’d have to talk you into it.” He nips at Nick’s chin, licking at the dip just under his lip, working his entire body over Nick’s in a slow writhe, all of his nerves jangling where they’re touching, from the butterfly on his stomach to where his balls are sitting snug on Nick’s. “Wouldn’t be your fault, I can be _very_ persuasive.”

Nick makes a noise like he’s trying to clear his throat to say something, but whatever it is, it never happens and god, Harry’s into it, the idea of making him actually speechless, getting them both off like this.

“Maybe you could take me to another party tomorrow,” he says, interspersing his words with a nuzzle to the sensitive hollow under Nick’s Adam’s apple, a graze of teeth to his ear, trying to ignite everywhere he can reach until Nick’s squirming, muscles in his arms standing proud and pointing the way to his fuzzy armpits. 

“I’ll flirt with everyone, be really shameless, suck on anything that’s near my mouth all wide-eyed like I don’t know what I’m doing, brush your ass as I pass.”

Beneath him, Nick spreads his legs, trying to grind up, breathing through his mouth. 

“You’ll start laughing at jokes no one made, stare at me like you can’t decide if you want to whack me across the cheek or bury your face between my thighs.” 

Harry licks his lip, bringing it into his mouth to bite on it in a poor quality imitation of a kiss. To stop himself going in for one, he pictures the way Nick’s lips would look tight and shiny round his dick. His stomach tucks itself up as he thinks about Nick opening up and swallowing him down, eyes slowly going big. Takes him a moment to remember where he was, unsure what’s really doing it for him: sensation or images.

“You’ll crack, grab me. Think you’re going to haul me out to a cab, but actually you just want all the others to see you’re the only one who gets to play with me. We’d find a corner – dark one – ” 

Harry lets go of one of Nick’s hands, licks his palm on its way down, shifts his weight enough to wrap his fingers round both of their dicks, knuckles digging into Nick’s stomach. Nick’s breath turns hot and fast as he starts to jerk them off, and he’s so close, hard puffs of air hit Harry’s nose. 

“ – go at it real urgent, like kids.” His hand mimics his words and he glances down to see the way their cocks look, flushed pink and shiny caught together in his fist. “Everyone would know exactly what we were doing from the state of your hair, even though no one actually saw a thing.”

He lets the image sit for a moment, trying to catch his own breath, which he lost somewhere around getting the rhythm just right. His head fills with a different tonight, one with Nick smacking James in the face for daring to touch and piling them into a corner to lick apologies onto Harry’s hipbones.

“Maybe we’d work up to the buffet table?” Harry says, thumbing the slippery head of Nick’s cock, working the wetness down his shaft before he picks up the pace again. “You bent over it and me on my knees showing everyone how you look riding someone’s tongue.”

In juddering tiny streaks of fire, Nick runs his fingernails over Harry’s hip, grunt on his mouth as his heel scrabbles on the duvet, trying to thrust harder into his hand. 

“You’d like it, seeing the redness creep up out of their shirts, wouldn’t you? Knowing they couldn’t look away, weren’t sure who they wanted to be – you or me.” Nick shifts underneath him, splays his hand warm and sweaty on the base of Harry’s spine, holding him there and shit, it’s perfect, the way it makes his back just dip. He tightens his grip and with the angle slightly different everything intensifies. “Maybe when you’re right on the edge I’d lick the sweat off the back of your knees and spread myself on the table for you.” 

Fluttering in his stomach, Harry gets right to Nick’s ear. “The girls are so wet while they watch us fuck they’re shifting on their heels. You whisper to me and tell me what to do, whether you want me to be quiet or scream the place down, and I do it, exactly like you say.” Nick turns into him, nose pressing his cheek, leg trembling like it does when he’s close to losing it, mouth open and unfocused on his skin. “Every guy in the room’s got his hands on his dick, desperate for it, but you’re a tease – you keep us all waiting, keep me waiting until I’m panting, until I’ve forgotten there’s anybody there but you – ”

Nick comes all over Harry’s fist, clinging to his hair with one hand, the other still trapped behind his head in Harry’s grip. Harry kisses the side of his face but without much purpose, too distracted by his own body and the way it’s whispering, _please_. He keeps going, using the come on his fingers to slick up his own dick and work them both together, thumb slipping over the head in a way that’s way too much. Nick, all dazed and red and sweaty, meets his eye before his hand on the back of Harry's head moves Harry to where Nick wants him. 

Kissing his throat real hard, teeth sharp as he digs in, he whispers, "You're amazing," and the only word left in Harry’s mouth is a curse as his orgasm hits.

He slumps onto Nick, burying his smile in his neck, letting Nick go so Nick can hug him. Even before he’s really had time to pull himself back together, he can tell: it’ll feel like an ice age before either of them speaks.

*

_My favourite breakfast was the one where you were at a meeting, came back with a coffee with my name on, croissant bits on your tie, and a frown, until you saw me sitting at the dining table, chewing on a pen._

_“Don’t tell me, poetry?” you said, and I’ll give you that because it does look like the kind of notebook a person might write haikus in between doodles of mountains and their own face._

_“Diary.”_

_Panic in your fingers as you set the coffee down. “And what of note’s happened today so far? All you’ve done by looks of it is get up and put hat on.”_

_I told you I never write about a day as it’s happening because it’s always too fast to understand. Didn’t help your twitchy digits as much as I thought it would, so I turned it around to show you March, the weekend I got unexpectedly sunburnt with Niall. Explained we went camping to avoid the landlord and we talked about Ireland, that sometimes he wants to go back. I left out that in writing about the way the grass smelt I figured why he doesn’t, that a country you can drive across in a few hours is too small for him to feel happy in, that he needs a strip of choppy sea to separate him from the spectres of his past._

_And you said –_

_“You strange boy.”_

_Only in your mouth it sounded like, “Adorable,” because of something you did with your face._

_Now I think, you did that a lot, amend things with your expression. Like you might’ve called me a pest but I think you meant darling, you said you hate disco but the thought had you smiling, and you told me Henry likes me when he doesn’t like anyone and I could tell you meant sorry, really really really sorry, because it made my chest feel like when you tie your trainers too tight and finally get the knot to undo._

_It’s odd when you can’t trust the words a person spews out to stand for what they’re supposed to, especially when they read your coffee order right out of your head while you slept._

_Odd and a bit sad, because it makes me wonder if I should’ve taken goodbye at face value when you said it, or known that wasn’t what you meant._

*

Harry’s never really been a lunch person, but being alone in a hotel room changes things, so at three he rings Ben and asks if can maybe have a jacket potato. Ben reels off about a million toppings and Harry whines into the phone, “Too much, Ben. Give me five, max. You know I’m really bad at choosing.”

“I’ll have the chef mix you our three most popular, shall I?”

“Depends. What are they?”

“Salmon and crème fraîche, baked beans, and coleslaw.” Harry imagines a woman in a white coat who wanted to be Gordon Ramsey but, like, not a giant dick mixing it together with her hands. “Don’t consider it, I was joking.”

Harry laughs and asks for sour cream. He flicks through the TV channels for a while and makes a token effort at getting dressed: jeans he needs to break in and one of Nick’s jumpers, this black thing that just hangs really nicely and feels a bit like wearing a hug. When Ben knocks, he mutes the TV with a toe to the remote and he’s so impressed with himself for actually doing that for the first time ever he catches his shin on the coffee table and has to hop to the door.

Ben’s too polite to mention his state of distress and just gets on with laying the table, adjusting the fork so it’s absolutely perpendicular to the slice in the top of the potato. 

“Big one,” Harry says. “You want to stay, share it?” 

“I’ve things to – ”

“Bullshit. Everyone here’s like Nick – total workaholic – they’re not going to be back until seven at the earliest. Bet you spend half the day playing Angry Birds under the desk. I’m more fun than that. Promise.” 

Ben looks at him as if he’s trying to work out if hanging out with _& guest_ is part of his job description. 

Sensing weakness, Harry clings to his arm. “I’m real lonely, Ben. Look, I’m watching the Channel Five afternoon movie and it’s about an ice dancer whose sister has cancer. It’s pathetic.”

“You could turn it off.”

“Already ruined one shin muting it. Don’t think I should risk it.”

“Ten minutes,” Ben says, and pulls out a chair on the other side of the table. 

 

In the end he stays for two hours. He must’ve been bottling up a lot of conversation behind that desk, because he tells Harry all about his wife, who he met at university, studying politics, and his dog, who’s adorable, and his dad, who’s a professor, and how he never intended to be a concierge and he still thinks he might give it up to make doll houses. 

“I like the miniature furniture. There’s an impressive level of detail.”

“Just be a smaller version of this, though. Literal downscale and this is the nicest, best polished building I’ve ever been in.”

That makes Ben swell up like a peacock and when he leaves, Harry thanks him twice and says he had a lovely time, and if Ben’s free same time tomorrow, maybe they can have afternoon tea?

He’s still debating whether the face Ben made was a yes, a no, or a maybe when he gets to the end of writing about his birthday in his notebook. Harry mouths his pen and rereads the words: 

_Swimming when it’s that cold makes you all achy. Next year I should do something dryer because I heard later people drown in that lake all the time. Maybe I knew that. Maybe I didn’t care as long as January washed off._

There’s probably more to say but outside there’s a conversation: Ben’s polite rumble and Nick’s big laugh. 

Nick always comes home the same way, undressing as soon as the door’s closed. This evening, he toes off his shoes as he walks – his socks match the flash of red floral in his suit pocket – and undoes the button at his collar, loosens his tie, flops onto the sofa as he messes up his hair.

“What a day,” he says. “Christ, I sound like my dad.”

Harry closes the book, fastening the bindings and tucking his pen under the leather thong. Out of everything Nick’s paid for him to have, he thinks it’s his favourite: tan leather and creamy paper. Makes him feel like what he’s writing is worth saying, since it’s sitting in something so nice.

“What you writing about now?”

“Skinny dipping.” Harry saunters over to stand behind the sofa, runs his fingers over Nick’s shoulders, out from his neck. “In winter.” 

Nick looks up at him, nose really weird upside down. “Not for the faint hearted. How do you remember what happened in what order if you don’t do it all straight away?”

“Don’t, really.”

“And it doesn’t bother you to miss bits out?” 

Boulders cluster under the surface of his jacket and Harry presses until Nick writhes, shoulder dipping as he lets out a moan.

“Take this off?” Harry pushes at his jacket. “Want to do it properly. Sit on the floor?”

“Bossy.” Nick looks doubtful but does it anyway, sliding onto the rug so Harry can hop over the back of the sofa and sit, fit his knees to the top of his arms and properly arrange his hands along the seams of his shirt. It’s a fine paisley effort, reminds him of Henry. Maybe that’s why Nick chose it.

“Nothing much bothers you though, does it?”

Harry starts with a long sweep and gentle prods to the base of his neck before getting into it, working his fingers into the knotted muscle and depressing his thumbs into the knobbles of his spine. “It does,” he says, quiet so Nick will only hear it if he’s really listening. “Just a while later, usually. What did you do today?”

“Tell me yours first. I’m too tired to be funny.”

Running his fingers up through Nick’s hair, backwards, because he likes it when Zayn does it to him when they’re pissed, Harry tries to remember. “Went for a run.” He lightly scratches at Nick’s scalp, working his fingers down to his temples to rub little circles there. “Took a bunch of pictures of, like, a flower stall and – oh yeah. Messaged this guy even though he was in some high powered meeting with one of the world’s best DJs – got pretty filthy at one point.”

Nick rolls his head back against Harry’s stomach, not an ounce of contrition in his eye. 

“Bathroom in that office looks real nice on Snapchat,” Harry says, leaning over him to look down at him nose to nose, his hair like a curtain. He kisses Nick’s eyebrow. “On the downside I can probably never go to that Caffè Nero round the corner again.”

Nick smiles, wrapping a hand around his ankle. 

“And then I had a jacket potato and a nice chat with Ben. His dog keeps humping footballs.” Harry goes back to his neck, prodding a sigh out of his nape, holding his head gently and working it back and forth in a soft roll. “Annie sign what you wanted her to?”

“Thinking about it. I’m mulling a new angle too.”

“We going out tonight?”

“Thought after the debacle at Henry’s we’d give it a miss,” Nick says. He looks up. He’s a bit grey under the eyes. “Unless you want – ”

“I like it here.”

Nick smiles and Harry feels like a traitor for letting Louis say all the things he did the other day at lunch, for giving up over pizza on correcting his impression of Nick as some old deviant with too much money and not enough dick.

“Wouldn’t have thought mulling would’ve made you so tired,” Harry says, rubbing the tops of his arms. 

Nick tenses so much he almost grows two inches and Harry’s heart goes wild at the thought he was fucking someone else. When Nick says – 

“Just – stuff with James. Bit complicated.”

Harry can’t tell if it’s a relief. “Oh?”

“Nothing to worry about,” Nick says. “I’m handling it.” His tone is clipped – there’s definitely more to it – but Nick strokes the hair on Harry’s toes the wrong way and glances up. “Hey, here’s a question. What’d you be doing if you weren’t here?” 

“Really want me to answer that?” 

“I’m not a prude.” 

Harry sighs, resting his chin on the top of Nick’s head. “What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

“Then I’d be bouncing about bars until I find someone. Don’t always.” 

“That – urgh – ” Harry flinches, thinking he’s disgusted, but it’s just a reaction to Harry pinching his shoulder blades. “ – more depressing or less depressing than when you fail to cop off in your free time?”

“Dunno.”

“Oh, because you’re so irresistible no one’s ever turned you down?” 

“Just – been a while since I tried, you know, unprofessionally. Ages, actually. Think I went on, like, a date in 2011 but only one, so obviously it didn’t go real well.” The memory clicks into place and Harry closes his eyes. “No, wait, it went too well, only she had a husband. Caught us most of the way to at it. At first he thought he was the threesome kind, but he changed his mind pretty sharpish when I accidentally got a bit of jizz in his hair. Don’t know if you’ve ever tried to wear a pillow case as a skirt as you make a run for it out of unfamiliar territory, but there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to do it and I think my technique needs work.”

Swivelling to look at him, Nick cocks his head. “That didn’t _actually_ happen? That’s not a scene from your actual life?”

Harry sniff-laughs into the shoulder of Nick’s jumper. “Was before I moved here. I’ve changed a lot.”

Nick drops his chin onto Harry’s knee and peers up at him. “So if I’ve a secret wife, we’re out of luck?”

“Have you got a secret wife?”

“I’d best check. Been to Vegas and Glastonbury and I think I broke down at Gretna Green once. Never know when I might’ve married someone for a laugh.” He stays there, wrapping his arms around Harry’s leg and yeah, he’s exactly the kind of person who sees a breakdown at Gretna as a sign to marry whoever he claps eyes on next. “And when you’re not working or legging it wearing a pillowcase?”

Huh. No one’s ever asked that. Normally a one-track mind, assuming his mind is one track. 

“Don’t laugh,” Harry says, “but sometimes, I just really like to light some candles and have a bath with music on.”

“Nothing funny about that. Sounds good actually.” Harry gets up, stepping out of the ring of his arms and almost toppling over because his foot’s gone to sleep. “What’re you – ”

“There’s a bath.” 

Harry stamps his way into the bathroom and turns on the tap, waving his hand into the stream to see if it’s getting hot before stoppering the hole in the bottom with the plug. He rubs at his foot to stop it from prickling, shakes it and sets it on the tiles, looking for bubble bath. Jewel-coloured bottles of it line up on the side – one deep and exotic purple like the smell of Egypt in an Elizabeth Taylor film, one green and piney like crushing a forest, one brilliant red that makes his nose itch but reminds him of expensive perfume. He goes for the purple because it seems the most Nick and empties half of it into the stream from the tap, watching as the bubbles rise like a foamy monster. 

Nick leans on the door. “You’re actually running me a bath?”

“Us. Running us a bath.”

“We going to get in one after the other like your mum made you do on a Sunday night?”

“What?”

“Oh, you were a fancy shower family were you? For us it were dad got in first, then mum, then my brother, then my sister, then me, then the dog. Water’d be so cold that sometimes I wouldn’t even get in – just splash about a bit and pretend, wet my fringe to look authentic.” 

Checking there’s not going to be an overflow, Harry gets up and goes over, reaching for Nick’s tie. 

“This is going to be nothing like that,” he says, and kisses him on the chin. “You can choose the music. You’ll only complain mine’s naff.”

*

_Niall says it’s important to do nothing, because the kind of nothing you do with someone tells you everything you need to know about who you are to each other. He only puts his slippers on when he knows it’ll just be the two of us and sometimes he plays the guitar. I carry on whatevering and then drop a handful of change in his case and ask if he knows anything from Dark Side of The Moon. He always plays Breathe (In The Air) really badly and I can never tell if he just can’t get any better at it, or if he’s reminiscing about the first time we pretended he was busking, copying all the details of that._

_Your kind of nothing is sitting behind me in the bath, washing scary stories off my knees, staying there until we get pruney and ordering Chinese. I beat you at strip Scrabble – you didn’t see that coming – and not that the stripping was a major component when we both only had dressing gowns to lose. You’re such a sore loser, even surrounded by more noodles than any one person could eat._

_“Yeah yeah, Wordsworth. I still think jukebox is two words.”_

_“But it isn’t.”_

_“You probably did that thing Derren Brown does where he spells a secret message to control his opponent’s mind. ‘Jukebox is one word, Nick, ooooone wooooord’.”_

_“How would I have spelled a message about the word jukebox? There’s only one j.”_

_“I don’t know the mechanics but you got this real smug shifty look when you played it.”_

_“Because I knew it was a winning score!”_

_“Because you knew your big dopey eyes were about to help you get away with cheating.”_

_“Seriously, I’ll get a dictionary if you’re going to keep going on about it.”_

_“Whatever.”_

_Thought you were going to sulk all night, naked at a see-through dining table with a glass of Merlot and half a dozen cold spring rolls. But –_

_“Can you be ready by nine tomorrow?” you said. “And nip to yours, fetch your passport. Baby face like yours, you might need ID.”_

_“Where we going?”_

_“Surprise. Casual clothes, comfy shoes, try your best to look cool otherwise I’ll have to ditch you at quarter past.”_

_Didn’t see it at the time – too busy making a face at the one you were pulling – but you’re a master at switching in and out of a strop, just to keep things entertaining._

*

It’s just a club, Harry tells himself, even though the queue outside’s behind an actual red velvet rope, with bouncers the size of cows blocking the door. He’d probably handle it better if he wasn’t still a bit giddy from the private plane thing and driving through a street the Arc de Triomphe straddled in the back of something far too big and sleek to be a cab.

Paris. Just for the night. How about that.

Nick breezes through the crowd, Harry muttering apologies as he follows, getting his elbow caught in someone’s bag strap and dodging into the way of two arguing French girls when he meant to do the exact opposite. When he gets to the front of the queue – it’s more of a narrow scrum, really – Nick reaches back for him, pulling him in by the shoulder. A woman on the door with a thing like a knuckle-duster fixed to one ear widens her eyes when she sees Nick and starts flapping the crowd back. 

“We weren’t expecting – ”

“Relax, I’m here to party not patrol. Let whoever’s on the bar know, yeah?”

She steps out of the way to let them into the lobby, where the light dips even from outside and neon signs point the way in cinematic swoops of arrow and outlined dancing boys and girls. Nick shoulders through the door bearing the lit-up pink legend: _abandonnez tout l'espoir si vous entrez ici_.

Muggy air hits Harry full in the face like a slightly damp boxing glove and he’s staggering from that anyway when a guy with a huge afro walks into him and almost spins him around, disorientation made worse by everything being black from the ceiling to the floor, the bar only visible by the light-up jewellery of the people working there. From the speakers pulses the kind of music Nick likes: bouncy and sexy, lyrics depicting a world where the worst thing that ever happens is having to mix a cocktail for yourself or getting a light bikini chafe. 

Leading the way to the bar, Nick nods at a few people, shakes hands with and kisses a few more, points at something on a shelf that Harry can’t make out and holds up two fingers. When the drinks arrive, they’re a tall glass filled with something fizzy and a shot glass on the side, delivered with a smile before light-up earrings backs away again.

All the pieces fit together: this is Nick’s club. 

Like he’s confirming it, Nick lifts his shot glass in salute and then drops it into the highball. Fizz goes up the side like a boiling, angry sea and Harry can just pick out flecks that weren’t there before dancing like fireworks. He moves in closer and ducks down eyelevel with the bar to watch, fingering his shot glass. It smells like fairgrounds.

Nick leans on his hand, pushing up his chin and his cheek to watch as Harry lines it up, mugs uncertainty, then drops the shot glass into the liquid. From here he can see better the glitter that was in the shot. The bubbles it meets make it go up like the trail blaze of a rocket.

“Pretty.”

“Matches your eyes.” Smiling because he knows he pulled the line off way better than Harry did, Nick lifts his glass and sips at it, wincing. “Oh Jeez, that’s worse than I remember.”

“Maybe stop ordering things just because they’re pretty. Get stuff you, like, _like_.”

“All the drinks I like make my hands look fat.”

“I can’t believe you did all this – ” Harry waves at the club. “ – with that brain.”

They stay there pulling faces at each other until the bar’s as crowded as the street outside, Harry trying to remember enough GCSE French to dazzle Nick with his translating ability. He’s doing all right with the music, but it’s mostly ‘Oh oh oh I like you, want to party?’ stuff and he loses all credibility claiming that the couple standing next to him are having a row about their mouse. 

“No one comes to a place like this on a Friday night to talk about their bloody mouse.”

“Maybe I misunderstood and they’ve been to Euro Disney?” 

“He cheated on her with Minnie, look at her face!”

Harry chances a glance just as the woman slaps the guy across the shoulder and storms off. He’s had two glitter bombs on an empty stomach and that’s enough to make everything hilarious, apparently. Harry muffles his laughter with Nick’s leather jacket, curling in against his neck to stay upright. 

“Can we break in there?” he shouts. Someone’s turned the music up or his hearing right down. “Theme park after dark would be so cool.”

“I’ll distract Donald Duck. You vault the fence, throw a cartoon steak down for Pluto.”

“What good’ll that do? Pocahontas is the badass. Her and her cat with eyeliner.”

Nick manoeuvres him away from his ear enough to look at with mild disdain. “That’s a – ” His lips keep moving and Harry squints at his mouth.

“What?”

“ – not a gothy cat. It’s a racoon.”

“My childhood is destroyed.”

And yeah, the glitter bombs make that hilarious to Nick, who cuffs him lightly around the head and pulls him into a giggle hug. When they straighten up, Harry pushes his hair up off his forehead and Nick stares at him as if he hasn’t seen him in an age, even though Harry was just right there up under his armpit. He liked looking at him on the way to the airport and on the plane too, kept laughing at Harry’s pouts about being kept in the dark, the surprise on his face when they reached the airport, the actual jump he did at the words, “We’re off to Paris. Thought it was about time you went clubbing.” 

Paris. Still weird. Beneath his feet – and the wood and several feet of concrete and the rubble in the foundations and maybe some other stuff he doesn’t know about – is France, when a couple of hours ago Manchester was drizzling on his face. He’s about to ask if Nick does this all the time – just flies off to wherever the party is – but Nick knocks their feet together.

“You want to dance, Harold? Seem to remember you were quite keen on that, once upon a time.”

“What about your toes? You didn’t want them getting trampled and my George Michael tattoo is not a lie.”

“Fuck my toes.”

Harry opens his eyes up like he’s surprised yet considering the suggestion and Nick grabs a handful of the waistband on his jeans and drags him onto the dance floor.

The air’s even muggier with the armpits of strangers and drinks lifted aloft around them. The lights flare like white beacons from some fortress in a fantasy film and they find a spot that’s not too close to the speakers nor too close to the stage, squash in where people are making the most of the dark, like in that Madonna song. 

Nick’s an enthusiastic dancer, although owing to lack of space it consists mostly of wiggling against Harry and bumping knees. At least that’s what Harry thinks it is until Nick’s lips hit his ear and he says:

“Ok, my stomach is genuinely killing. This could be an actual fitness craze.”

Harry realises he’s not been moving his feet, all of the wriggles and writhing originating higher up, and Harry joins in for the rest of the track, even though he’s pretty much sure they look like weird jumping beans. 

Nick pulls him close to whisper into his ear as the DJ mixes something in, barely there beneath the other track. 

“This is my favourite.”

It stirs up, takes over, something deep and brooding, a slow spin that sounds like desire forced into the grooves of a record and played back at the wrong speed, vocals pitching between exasperated lover caught in a prison and exultant preacher telling everyone how great it is inside love’s walls. They edge more to the middle of the room, where a guy and a girl are grinding against each other and a circle of women with day-glow hair are twirling in a complicated reel. 

Harry wraps his arms around Nick’s neck, sinks into him, smiling when Nick pulls him closer, fingers splayed on the small of his back. Harry rests his temple against his cheek, so close the sweat-warmth of Nick’s shirt runs onto his skin. It had been a line when he said it, _reckon I’d like to dance with you_ , but it’s nice, actually.

Someone notices a guy behind the decks and starts a whoop that rolls over their heads and turns into a ripple of applause. 

“Is it someone really famous?”

“That,” Nick says, pressing the words direct to Harry’s ear, “is Frankie Knuckles. Godfather of house. Going to play tracks he dropped at the opening of the original Factory back in the day.”

“That’s pretty cool?”

In answer Nick smiles and pulls him back in, and it’s not like Harry gets it, really, why it’s a big deal, but he gets that it is one and that’s why Nick brought him here. It makes his toes curl. 

The club folds up around them until the bass is just a pulsing in his ears, the crowd just a warm hand holding them up, all of his focus on fitting his breathing to Nick’s and the thrum beneath his skin when Nick’s thumbs brush under the hem of his shirt. The music’s good – at least he likes it, isn’t as bothered here by the lack of lyrics as he was when they play-argued about it in the bath. “House is more about the experience,” Nick said. “Collective desire. Room full of people with one aim in mind: to get off. Off their face, off with someone, off their life like it’s a bus. It’s a soundtrack to you living, not a recording of someone rationalising what they did last month.”

Soon as he said it, Harry kind of got it, although he didn’t let on. Just settled back against his chest and played with the bubbles, letting the music sink to the background, a foil for his thoughts. He’d decided it was nice to listen to something unencumbered by worrying if he was understanding the meaning or getting the lyrics all wrong. 

Here, with Nick’s body against him, it makes perfect sense. He doesn’t want some pop star nudging into this space, he just wants to feel it: the weight of Nick’s hands and the sweat in the crease of his elbows, the brush of their stomachs, the promise of _later_ and being just this close but more.

Nick’s neck is there and smelling all cake shoppy so he kisses it. It’s not enough; he wants Nick to really feel it, fits his mouth more soundly, open, licks then gently bites. Nick reacts like he always does, with this slight dip in his knees, so Harry does it again, easing onto his toes to move higher, drawing one hand down inside his collar to hold him there. He’s close enough to feel the breath Nick sucks in and Harry noses at his jaw, running over the hard line of it to the softness of his cheek, leaving kisses he imagines are little bigger than freckles. He bumps the side of Nick’s nose with his. He didn’t mean for it to happen, the collision of the corners of their mouths, but realising it has, he stays there, breathing really hard, but not as hard as Nick.

Urged on by the track and that bit of him that always wants to do what he’s not supposed to, he tilts, clinging to the collar of Nick's leather jacket as he navigates the end of Nick’s nose. He does it slow enough that Nick should feel him coming, has time enough to move away if he wants, but when he reaches the other side of his nostrils, Nick hasn’t budged. His eyelashes brush his cheek – shit, his eyes are all but closed – and his fingers dip just slightly into Harry’s back where they’re fanned against his skin. 

Harry skims Nick’s lips with his. 

They’re warm and dry, let out a hot flutter of breath, and Harry catches it with another kiss. He thinks he intends for that to be it, like he was just making sure his mouth didn’t feel left out, but even as he’s thinking that, he’s tightening his grip on the ridge of warm leather between his fingers and pressing in for another.

Still, he’s not quite ready for it when Nick opens up and lets him in, when everything stops being careful and Nick’s slip-sliding them into a deeper kiss. He relies on the arm around Nick’s neck to keep him steady as the first touch of Nick’s tongue on his makes his brain fold up. 

Nick’s grip tightens and he draws Harry up enough to nearly lift him off his feet; after that, they’re both more greedy than graceful as they explore each other’s mouths. Harry starts to resent all these people between them and the wall, wants to be there right now with their thighs between each other’s, biting at Nick’s lip, having Nick not care who’s looking as he fumbles for his dick. He pulls back with his heart stammering to see how far away they are from one, and when the mouth that was just on his goes slack and shocked, he remembers who Nick is, who he is, that shit, he’s really not supposed to do this, let alone want it.

“Um – sorry – ”

Pushing through the crowd, Harry gets tangled in armpits, elbows, and shoulders, ducking away from the sound of his name and hiding his face in the sweaty flesh of strangers. 

Niall’s voice rattles in his head: 

“Don’t kiss them on the mouth, okay?”

“Why? That’s nothing compared to – ” 

“Gets messy, that’s why.”

“What if I want to?” 

“Not what you’re there for. Focus on the job – the dick – in hand.”

He’s spinning on the inside by the time he finds somewhere to hole up where he can be alone: the toilets. A girl staggers out of the furthest cubicle, one eye shut and her hair a halo of frizz. Harry backs against the wall to let her past, smiles, pushing his palms onto the cold of the plaster and waiting for it to filter up. So hot in here. He relocates to the sinks when the door closes behind her, stares at the plug to avoid his face in the mirror and tries to decide if he’s going to be sick. Maybe the kiss just reignited the glitter bomb fizz. It wasn’t a reaction to Nick just – 

The crowd outside whoop a particularly good selection. He runs one of the taps and splashes water on his wrists, wondering if Nick’s dancing with someone else. God, he hates the thought of that. Breathing hard, he catalogues his tattoos: the smell of the shops and the designs on the wall, who was there, who he showed first, who laughed longest and hardest and who just shook their head. Maybe he should get another one. He’s wanted an acorn for a while. That might be nice. Something to remember Paris by. He won’t have to save up like usual; it should be a more pleasing thought than it is.

In his pocket, his phone’s losing it. When he can’t ignore it any longer, he has three missed calls and a voice message from Nick. The red dot seems accusatory. He wants to make it disappear, tries to remember if you can delete a voicemail without listening to it, or work out if the music would drown it out, so long as he doesn’t put it right to his ear. He gets a text:

> _where the fuck r you? Answer your fucking phone_

He wonders about flushing it.

Outside, the club is throbbing, thumping the bones of his ears.

His phone goes again but this time it’s Niall: a picture of the own brand Super Noodles he’s having for dinner. Harry strokes his number, unsure if he really means to dial but whatever, it’s doing it, and then he’s pressing his phone to his head, hard so he can hear. 

“Hey, what’s up?” Niall says. 

The door opens, letting in a waft of bass. Harry exchanges glances of surprise with a woman with cherry red hair as she stalls on the threshold. “I’m not waiting,” Harry says, and waves her into one of the cubicles. 

“Where are you?” Niall says. “Sounds like – ”

“In a toilet. In a club. In, like, Paris.”

“You sound weird. You take something, what?”

Harry presses his phone to his ear until he can feel the sweat on it. “It’s nothing. How’re your noodles? We had them too. Not tonight, though, haven’t eaten yet, actually. That might be why I feel a bit – ”

“What’re you saying?”

Harry lists to the side and rests his head on the hand dryer. He stays there until Niall starts saying his name over and over and over, asking if he’s still there.

“All right, I’m – pissed.”

“It’s allowed.”

“And – there was a kiss. With the guy I’ve been – ”

Niall’s indignation’s mostly lost to white noise and signal dip, so Harry only really gets to hear “bastard” and “slapped him” before the call goes dead. He waits for Niall to call back but he doesn’t, so Harry tries a text.

> _I kissed him_

That doesn’t really explain it, so he adds:

> _Wanted to keep doing it._
> 
> _Repeatedly._
> 
> _But messy, yeah?_
> 
> _Why m hiding in the toilet probably_

He clings to his phone and reads the graffiti scraped into the wall while the cherry red woman washes her hands. It’s all in French so he has to guess at most of it and she flicks water all over his jeans while he stands there, dryer vibrating under his skull.

> _Do u like him?_

Harry swallows. Trust Niall to find exactly the question. He tries to knock the answer into his head on the dryer, working it out as he types with one thumb.

> _He’s cool_
> 
> _Sexy_
> 
> _Weird_
> 
> _Kind_
> 
> _Makes me laugh_

When the reply comes, it’s:

> _Jesus Christ_
> 
> _it’s just your arse that’s supposed to be for sale Harry_

It’s a bit like being slapped all over, including his soul.

He can’t think of a reply so Harry takes a picture of the sinks and the tampon machine and posts it captioned: _city of romance_.

Wait, why is there a – 

Oh god.

Harry has that feeling he gets sometimes: one day, he’s going to remember this, see the look of surprise the cherry red woman gave him on the face of a stranger and pow, he’ll see himself like she did and have to hit the floor on his face. It spurs another thought: while you’re breathing in carpet or rug or polish, you’re going to realise that what you should’ve done is just slid off Nick’s face and back to his neck and carried on dancing. Could’ve just had a smile against his skin, pretended the glitter made you temporarily forget the rules, that all you could taste in his mouth was Red Bull, not how much he wanted the wall and the teenage groping like you did. 

Shit, that would’ve been perfect. So much better than trying to find a way to leave the toilets, go back to him, and have sex without it being weird because he panicked. 

It’s enough to make him feel as if his hair has magnetised and stuck him to the curved metal of the dryer. He closes his eyes to see if the toilets will have turned into somewhere else when he opens them again, but that never really works.

A thought creeps in, sneaky, like it’s on its toes: he can’t stay here all night. Sooner or later someone’s going to think he’s a pervert. 

Have him thrown out. 

Of Nick’s club. 

For being a pervert.

Nick’ll have to come and collect him, knowing he is a pervert but that’s not why he was in the women’s toilet.

And if there’s anything that’s going to make the sex even more awkward, it’s that.

Sighing, Harry has an idea: just, like, act as if nothing happened and you went for a pee. Maybe he can pull that off. He tries it, the face he’ll make, incredulous at Nick’s anger, confusion, whatever. Probably not his best face but maybe if they have another glitter bomb, it’ll do?

He texts Nick:

> _In the ladies’, why?_

He waits for a reply, going over the face he should make, rearranging his shoulder against the vent, and he’s just got the brow perfect when the door opens and there’s Nick, appearing too abruptly for Harry to even lift his head off the dryer.

Nick eyes him, clutching his phone, nostrils flared, hair practically in a different atmospheric band to the rest of him.

“Good hideout,” he shouts over the music he’s let in. 

“Said I was nipping for a wee. Music – ” Harry waves at the air in illustration. “ – didn’t hear.”

“My tinnitus isn’t that bad.” Harry has to lip read the rest, but Nick’s over enunciating it, making it easy. “You said ‘I’m sorry’ and scampered off.” 

“I – ”

Nick shakes his head and gestures for Harry to come with him.

Peeling himself up, Harry slinks towards where he’s holding the door open, ducks underneath his bracelets and out into the clinging sweatiness of the club. He goes to head back to the dance floor, but Nick catches him by the collar and steers him out to the lobby. He was probably hoping it’d be quieter, but a guy in a baseball cap’s swaggering about and cursing in French, a small crowd egging him on while he tries to land one on a bouncer’s face. 

Nick edges in front of Harry, making a wavering note of displeasure as he has to swerve to avoid a drunken, flailing elbow. He reaches for Harry’s wrist and guides him past. 

Harry wants to be annoyed because he’s not a kid, but all he can think about is Nick’s fingers right on his skin. 

They edge out into the queue-come-crush, push through to blissful chill air. Harry breathes in, closing his eyes to ride it like a high, and when he lets it out he feels really empty, suddenly frail, like glass. 

Nick wets his lips and drops Harry’s hand. For the first time since they met, he’s been abandoned by both quip and quiff, the former never coming, latter wilting.

“You hungry?” Harry says. “We should get a burger.” 

The look on Nick’s face suggests those aren’t the words he was expecting, but he shoves a hand into his pocket, shrugs, and steps off the pavement. They find a place where the burgers come wrapped in checked greasy paper like segments of old fashioned tablecloth. Harry orders for both of them in really rusty French, stumbles over how to get them to go and has to mime it, but the girl behind the counter must think it endearing because when they find a bench to sit on and open them up, he’s got extra gherkins. 

“Charmer.”

Over the sound of Nick taking a bite, Harry hears water and peers into the dark. Only it’s not dark, not really – there are lights strung in swags through the buildings opposite and cruise boats idly drift past like those floating lanterns in _Tangled_. Everything smells of compost. “Is this the Seine?”

“No, it’s Paris’s other really famous river.” Nick wipes a spot of mayonnaise off the corner of his mouth with his thumb and sighs at the cheeseburger on his knee. 

“You cranky about missing Frankie – ” Harry frowns, trying to retrieve the correct body part. “Ankles?”

“Frankie Ankles? Sounds like a spoon player from 1950. You really think he’d have got anywhere but the first audition for _Britain’s Got Talent_ with a name like Frankie Ankles? It’s Knuckles.”

“That’s not better.”

“Take it up with his mother, Christ.”

He fists his hair – Harry thinks he probably gets a bit of mayo in it – and just to wind him up, Harry leans in and pulls one of Nick’s gherkins out of the side of his burger. He folds it into his mouth deliberately slowly, enjoying Nick’s glare under the watchful glow of the Eiffel Tower. “Go back in a bit if you want.”

“I don’t.”

“Why?” 

Nick sighs and clamps his jaw together, but he likes to talk too much to leave a question unanswered so Harry just eats his burger and waits it out, watching the people on a party barge clink glasses as they sail on past.

“Good story, isn’t it?” Nick leans back on the bench, knees knocking together. “Flew to Paris to go to a club where a big name DJ’s secretly playing a legendary set, left before he really got into it, via a quick detour through the women’s lav and a fistfight.”

He actually sounds like he might mean it, that in his head a good night out isn’t some textbook decent time that happens once, it’s an anecdote he can tell over and over. 

“With a hooker.” Harry pokes at ketchup on the wrapper of his over-gherkinned burger, feeling the word go clunky in his mouth. “You flew to Paris _with a hooker_. Stronger opening line.”

Nick’s eyes look at him, the rest of him staying completely still. He blinks and goes back to staring at his burger.

“Should’ve bought a padlock,” Harry murmurs. “Who started that, you think? And who looks at a padlock left on a bridge and thinks ‘oh, love was here’ and not, like, just a bike that got stolen?”

“When you ask shit like this, do you really want an answer or are you just musing to pass the time?”

“Bit of both, probably. I’ll take the answer if you have it but I don’t really care enough to look it up on my phone.”

“People write on them with Sharpies,” Nick says, although it sounds more like a sigh. “Ken and Keith, July 2012, first date. Maud and Francois engaged. Derek and his poodle, ten years going strong.”

“You ever leave one? Said you’d been here before.”

Nick rubs his palms on his jeans. 

“Sorry, I’m being nosy.” 

“No, it’s – ” Nick shifts on his seat, running his hand down his neck, leaving it there, fiddling with the pendant caught at the bottom of the chain. “Walked over the bridge, once. With a hangover. Not the best idea. People snogging everywhere while I staggered through, smelling of loneliness and Absinthe.”

“You tried the strong stuff?”

“My loneliness is always sixty per cent proof and mildly hallucinogenic. Only the best for me.”

Harry attempts to see this as if it’s not really happening, as if it already has so he knows what to say having already said it. He can’t quite do it, though, has to settle for wondering whether this will be bitter or sweet when he relives it. Maybe both; already tastes like that. If he blanks out the gherkin.

Shifting closer, he bumps Nick’s side with his elbow but keeps his gaze trained on his knees in case Nick looks at him. 

“Kiss rule’s for your benefit as much as mine,” he says quietly, “so you don’t get attached and weird.”

“Managed to live with a boyfriend for a year and not get attached, think I can handle a snog, thanks.”

“You had a live-in boyfriend?”

“Shit.” Nick tuts, shaking his head and rolling his burger up in its wrapper, setting it on the bench. “No, I didn’t.”

“You _just_ said – ”

“Fine. I had a pal I lived with and we had sex once a hangover and he carried my record boxes, thought that meant more than it did.”

“What happened?”

“Think one of their names was Royston. Can’t vouch for if he was the one with his arse in the air when he walked in or the one who’d already passed out.”

Harry half-chews down a mouthful of burger and cheese, unable to wait to properly swallow it to ask, “How bad did the boyfriend take it?”

“Was fine. I’d been meaning to chainsaw all my possessions, start afresh.”

“Oh my god.”

Nick does his eye thing again, only this time there’s more _you’re really very gullible_ mixed in with the rebuke. “Wasn’t exactly a catch back then.” He breathes in with a solitary laugh. “Still not, just slightly thinner and much better dressed.”

“You’re all right,” Harry says, helping a bit of lettuce into his mouth. “Get a dog and fall in love with your neighbour.” 

“That’s how it’s done, is it?” 

“At first you wouldn’t like each other, like, he bangs on the wall to complain about your music and your dog, who barks a lot. Nerves, mostly.” Harry presses his lips together as he imagines someone for Nick – older, grey hair, maybe. Plays the cello in the symphony. “You’re protective of the dog, because you rescued it, so you decide you hate him. You start getting up earlier to take the dog out for a pee and you slam the door on purpose. You pass in the halls occasionally being really falsely polite, and you thank him for the soundproofing catalogues he keeps having sent to you, then make sure he sees you dump them in the recycling. Bit of a challenge, going from that to admitting you love him, but it’s not supposed to be easy, is it.”

Nick hides his smile inside the top of his jacket. “So that’s me sorted. You? You got a man squirreled away somewhere?”

“Only Niall but he’s not a boyfriend. Never really had one.”

“Girlfriend?”

“At school.” Harry sighs. “But I didn’t really take to it.”

“What happened?”

“I – didn’t really take to it? There’s no funny story, just – we were together for a bit and then not so much.”

“Hate it when that happens, when someone breaks up with you and they don’t even like you enough to do it in an amusingly heartless fashion.” Nick brushes burger bun crumbs off his skinny jeans. “If we’re really doing this, what’d you write in your lonely heart advert?”

Harry rests his elbow on the back of the bench and snuggles into the heel of his hand. “If you’re funny, please say hi.”

“That’s it? You wrote a fucking novel for me. Probably even has a subplot where he gets a dog too and mine and his fall in love over a plate of spaghetti, with me in the corner going, ‘don’t you dare let that sauce drip off your ears onto my new carpet you horrible mutt! It’ll never last, she’s too good for him.’ ” Harry laughs against his wrist and Nick shifts, bringing his knee up, fingers clasped around his ankle, where socks that match his t-shirt disappear into middle-aged Converse. “Seriously? That’s all you want? The odd chuckle?”

“And someone who’s into me,” Harry says, picking at Nick’s laces, “not just someone who’s into me being into them.”

“Maybe you’ll meet him in a club,” Nick says. “You’ll both be dancing to the beat of a song that’s not playing and he has an interesting face at best and you can’t quite work out if you fancy him or not. He whispers jokes into your ear and it’s not them that make you weak at the knees, it’s the way he smiles when you laugh, like he can’t be happy if you’re not. You go home with him because you’re curious what it’d be like. You stay because you can’t quite pin him down. You love him because you know no one else will and because the way he loves you back is just a bit too clumsy to be anything other than real.” 

Harry’s pulled his lace really tight while he’s been talking, can tell Nick’s watching it cling around his finger. They stay there for ages, Harry wondering if the thing beating quicker in his ear is his own blood or Nick’s heart, somehow migrated, burrowed under his skin like an insect.

“You do this often?”

“Sit on a bench in Paris in the middle of the night with a half-eaten burger? No, but I think I’m going to start.” Nick lobs his burger into the bin. “About time I developed an eccentricity.”

“Meant pay for – company?” Harry says, hoping that’s the right word. 

Nick tilts his head to look at Harry, eyes shiny and goading. “Matter if I did? You jelly?”

Harry rolls his eyes, but he is, a bit. Not just of the idea of other guys Nick might have paid to fuck but of the ones Henry and James hinted at and the imaginary silver haired boyfriend he just made up especially for him. He hates him most of all, actually, which is stupid as he’s the only one who doesn’t exist.

His skin tingles; Nick’s fingers are walking over the back of his neck and curling up into his hair. Craning into it, Harry tries not to smile at the warmth radiating up over his scalp and trickling down his back, tries to keep it as a petulant pout.

Awkwardly rearranging his leg, Nick fits his fingers like a crook to his shoulder and pulls him in, mouth right next to Harry’s ear. 

“There’s been no one as strange as you.”

Trying to contain the shiver between his shoulder blades, Harry turns his face to look at him. He’s close, mostly eyelashes and freckles and this slightly shy smile that’d apply if Harry were first, last, and only or if he had the number of every prostitute in four counties on speed dial. 

Leaning in, Harry whispers, “Why did you do this?” 

“Maybe I was just curious what you get for a grand. You spotted it, although I wouldn’t agree you’re a trinket. I like to try the best.”

“Meant – this?” Harry glances at the Seine, at the Eiffel Tower, at the bridge. “This is just really unnecessary, Nick, unless – ”

Nick’s blink is slow and his gaze falls to Harry’s mouth. 

Harry just needs to kiss him. Breathing too hard and fast, wishing it were just a bit colder so Nick could see the evidence of his nerves on the air, he touches Nick’s chin to draw him in.

“You know what you’re doing?” Nick whispers. 

Let you know in a few months, Harry thinks.

*

The flat has shrunk like a cheap wool jumper on a high wash. Maybe that’s why Harry’s elbows itch and his throat feels as if something’s wrapped around it. He unrolls the suit bags and hangs them on the washing line in the lounge. He folds the jeans Nick bought him and places them on top of the ones he’s had since he was fifteen that are all baggy around the knees. He feels like he’s snooping through his own things. He makes himself a cup of tea but when he’s on the sofa with it, he can’t seem to remember why or how to drink it, and that’s how Niall comes home and finds him staring at the burn mark on the wall.

“All right?”

Rubbing at his arms, suddenly cold and raw from the inside out, Harry nods, carrier bag rustle too loud and harsh as Niall comes round to join him. 

“So you’re – ” With a sharp intake of breath, Niall takes Harry’s chin, turns his face into the light. “Jesus – what happened to you?” 

Harry jerks back, hiding fairly ineffectually in the top of his jumper.

No, wait. Nick’s.

“He hit you? These rich motherfuckers, they think – ”

“Wasn’t him. It's nothing.” At Niall's open, sceptical mouth, Harry adds, “Looks worse than it feels. Always shows up more the day after, right?” 

“What?” Niall says. “He let someone else hit you and you still fucking stayed another night? That's – ”

“He didn't _let_ – it was – ” Harry pictures it, James shoving him against the wall, broken nails digging into his wrist. It’s as if James's breathing hot and heavy on all of his skin and he flinches. “Um – can I tell you about it later?”

Niall ferrets in the carrier bag he’s dangling and offers him a lollipop. 

Harry’s breath goes too big in his chest. It’s pink. His favourite. He tries to force down the swoop of emotion – he can’t even tell which one it is, just that it’s huge and soaring. He clasps his fingers around the lollipop, pressing the crinkles of cellophane into those of his fingers. 

“Save it for after dinner,” Niall says. “I got Coco Pops.”

Harry gets up, wrapping his arms around his middle to sure himself up. “Might just go to bed.”

“He wear you out before he let you go?”

“Something like that.”

The room’s exactly the same: pictures of London and bands he likes stuck with chewing gum on his side of the wall; lamp he bought for £3 at a clearance sale draped in a thin t shirt because the bulb’s too bright; mattress and a tangle of blankets on the floor. It’s there that he lies until it goes dark and Niall goes to work. 

Harry tries to make sense of everything that happened between Paris and here. It was only two days ago, but all he can really remember is kissing the entire flight back, watching dawn creep in over the bed and Nick's skin, having the daylong kind of sex, and then James barging in. That's a bit of a blur, the only really clear bit the aftermath: Nick kneeling on the floor in the hotel room next to him chuntering, “Oh god, oh god,” and threatening to take him to casualty. 

“You're acting like no scumbag I wouldn't shag for a million quid ever tried it on with me before,” Harry said, blinking the stars out of his eyes and attempting a laugh. 

“You bang your head on the wall? How many fingers am I holding up?”

Harry squinted at him. “Fourteen thousand and ten. No, wait, eleven.” Nick huffed and it was cute, really, how pale and shocked he looked, as if he were the one who'd been on the receiving end of a skull to the face. Harry used Nick's shoulders to push up onto his feet, show him it was no big deal. “Seriously I'm fine, Nick. Stop being an old woman.”

Nick smiled, got up with him, but he touched the smarting part of Harry's cheek as if he didn't believe him. He said, “I'm going to get you something to put on that and have a little word with Ben about what they did with him. You stay here. Chain the door behind me if – ” 

Gingerly, Harry fingers the bruise, wincing. Small price to pay, really, for what happened after: Nick holding fifty quid's worth of sirloin to his face, so gentle when he’d sheepishly kissed it better. “Let's get your things together and I'll arrange you a car,” he said. “Take you home or wherever you'd rather.” 

“Said I'd stay 'til Sunday.”

“Harry, you don't have to just 'cos – ”

“No. I'm staying. Can we please go back to bed?”

Swallowing, Nick nodded. He retrieved the duvet from where they'd left it on the balcony and they slept for ages, fitted together like spoons, Nick's knees snug in the back of his. When Harry woke him, it was for the kind of sex Harry thought all sex would be like when he hadn’t done it yet: clingy fingers on each other's faces, breath almost non-existent, words blue.

He's not sure Niall would get it.

He checks the clock on his phone, does the journey maths, hitting Nick’s name until every conversation and emoty is staring back at him. Started out flirty, a game to keep Nick amused and messaging back, and at some point he just started sending Nick pictures of what he was looking at, little hints of what he was thinking added underneath. Back, he’d get Nick making silly faces, his tongue out in front of offices he was at for a meeting, his head resting on a taxi window, couple of misfires of his feet. There are new words from him Harry didn't see arrive:

> _Make it home ok?_

Harry thinks about the car that'd been waiting for him when he left at lunchtime. Not a limo, not quite, but close enough. Ben had even got the door for him.

> _Really likes the scenic route, doesn't he, your driver?_
> 
> _You?_

He chews on his lip and flicks through new photos: Zayn’s finished the piece he’s been doodling all over a bridge down on the canal; Louis has new trainers with more room around the toes; Liam found a leaf with a pattern he thinks looks like the Bat symbol. Just as he’s liking that, his phone vibrates with a picture. Dark wooden floors with arty scuffmarks sprawl out from Nick’s trainers. On a rug by a vintage trunk for a coffee table sits a very bright-eyed dog.

Harry squints to drink up all the details: the pictures stacked waiting to be hung on the wall, the edge of a sofa, a chew toy that’s more chew than toy. For a second he thinks Nick’s done what he suggested: got a dog and fallen in love with a neighbour, but of course he hasn’t had time.

> _Dog sitter says she ate all my favourite shoes, a tennis ball, the TV remote, and a whole packet of Custard Creams. Because she loves me. Unconvinced._

Harry takes a picture of the lamp.

> _It missed me too._

The screen goes dark, and while he’s waiting for it to light up again, Harry falls asleep with his phone and a lollipop in his hand.

*

_It’s not that I can’t stop thinking about you, it’s that I don’t want to._

_It’s raining, which doesn’t help. Like, what else is there to do between raindrops than stare and see all the things we didn’t do, but might’ve?_

_I miss Paris. I miss what we could’ve been in Paris if we were slightly different people._

_No, wait, if we were exactly the same and all the circumstances were thrown up in the air and landed different, because I wouldn’t want you different or me different because then we’d be us different and I liked the way we were._

_That’s a song, right? You probably hate it. You’d say, “Turn that schmaltzy shit off, Harold, and put on something we can dance to,” but secretly I think you’d be waltzing inside and remembering the bench in Paris where we didn’t meet and yet is where I think we’ll always be scratched._

_Some people do that, leave etches of their names where they met or other markings of the spaces that belong to them, or they kid themselves do because places never belong to anybody: they’re like cats. I don’t think I’d want to go back and scribble us on where we sat. Generally I’m just not a big fan of vandalism. But maybe we could throw a padlock into the canal sometime? Maybe that would be a symbol of something, if only that I’ve gone in-Seine._

_In my head, I can hear you laughing at that. Wonder how long that will last._

*

“You coming? Lovely night for it.”

Harry shakes his head. 

“Too good for this, now, are you?”

“Maybe we both are.”

“We got bills need paying. When his money runs out, how you going to afford – ”

“I don’t know. But not that.”

*

_Paris was still on your lips when you kissed me back in the bedroom that seemed like it was ours. Good to have the bed be familiar because the kissing threw us off kilter. Having decided we were doing it we couldn’t get enough of it and I fumbled it, getting you out of your clothes, you fumbled it, dropping the lube on the way to my hand._

_“If that’s something you’d be into doing,” you said. “Me, I mean.”_

_I didn’t say, “I’m into anything you want me to be into, love, remember?” because it stopped feeling like you were paying the second I said ‘flew to Paris with a hooker’ and you looked at me, all pissed off in the eyes. I kissed a heart shape on your stomach on the way down – could you tell? – and whispered, “How’d you like it?”_

_“Been so long I’ve forgotten.”_

_That heightened it, I guess, how nervously you wanted it, the way you hid your face under the pillow as I slid between your legs. Which are ridiculously endless, by the way. Didn’t really notice until they were spread for me and shaking. I liked it, watching as you forgot to be cool and turned to jelly on my fingers, then my dick._

_Vaguely remember asking, after, if it was okay._

_Vividly recall you answering by turning me over and eating me out while I clung to the headboard._

_Most of all I remember walking my fingers over your freckles and kissing, like we were only ever going to do that._

_Falling for you will always taste like breakfast wrapped in a duvet at sunset on a balcony, and a little bit like gherkins, and oddly I don’t mind that at all._

*

Niall peels up the blankets and gets in, _ho-ho-ho_ ing against the cold and screwing up into a ball, knees at Harry’s back. Catching the glint of Harry’s eyes, he says:

“Why’re you not asleep?”

Harry shrugs, and Niall burrows an arm underneath him, snuggling into the back of his neck like a frigid little imp. He smells of the Lynx he sprayed all over himself in the bathroom, but it barely covers the tang of spunk, weed, and sweat. 

“Zayn was asking after you. Said he texted about finishing the drawings for that tattoo you wanted but you never replied.”

“Turned my phone off.” 

“Are you fucking kidding? You never do that.”

Harry noses into the pillow so Niall won’t see what he’s thinking: person I wanted to wasn’t ringing. Better to pretend he might’ve than to sit on the sofa knowing that he hadn’t, wasn’t, won’t. 

“Does it hurt?”

Niall means the bruise splattered under his eye, which has gone impressively purple. It’s mostly painless, unless he pokes it. Harry nods anyway.

“Aww, sweetie, be better soon,” Niall says, kissing his hair, wrapping him in a cuddle, and humming to try and lull him to sleep.

*

_I think the internet has caught you like a cold. Tonight it sneezed you all over this porn site I go to sometimes when I can’t sleep. You’d swapped arses with this blond twink dousing himself in baby oil, you were the fingers of this weird French guy who responded to everything with, “Oh, merde!” You were even in this grainy live cam, not in the guy so much but he had these cushions I thought might really go in your lounge. Put me off, wondering if I should ask where he got them and text you a link or if that’d be, you know, weird._

_It’s not just there: you’ve infected my email with a complete absence of emails with your name on, spread to my phone, can’t even listen to music without hearing you telling me whether you like it or not._

_I don’t think you’re going to clear up. I think you’re actual man flu._

_I’m really sorry for that pun. Better or worse than when we saw a dog peeing up a tree and I said it’s the B’ark de Triomphe?_

*

“Totally a shiner,” Louis says as he prods Harry’s face.

Harry swats him off, wincing, although it’s more about the prod than the bruise.

“What did the other guy look like?” Liam says, throwing a piece of gum into the air and catching it in his mouth.

“Blond. Chunky. No fingernails.”

Liam hesitates that way he does when he’s trying to figure out if it’s him or Harry being stupid. “Meant – did you whack him one.”

“Oh.”

Wrapping his hands about his beer, Harry stares at the carpet where it disappears under the sofa and Zayn’s feet. You can see more of the floorboards through it than the last time he was here, hear more of the row happening on the next floor down. “How would we define whack?” he says.

“For fuck’s sake Harry, just tell us what happened,” Louis says, “stop moping like Sylvia Plath.”

“How’d you know who Sylvia Plath is?” Zayn says, tugging his fingers through Harry’s hair. 

“I got a C in English.”

Harry can feel them all waiting, because they do this: turn the bad things into stories to make them smaller. He takes a swig of beer to fuzz James's face a bit.

“We weren’t even dressed and I thought he’d be more food when he knocked.” Harry rests his head on Zayn’s shoulder, nestles his bottle between their thighs, and turns Zayn's arm over, tracing the line of his newest tattoo. He thinks it’s supposed to be something Egyptian but it looks a bit like a camel upside down. “Wasn’t expecting it – you know, someone pushy, not in a fancy place like that, so that’s how he got in. He had work news – something Nick'd be impressed with, he thought – and he grabbed me – ” Harry fingers Zayn's wrist until Zayn gets the idea and opens his hand for Harry to hold. “ – shoved me against the wall, shouted – why didn’t they both do me to celebrate, put their disagreement behind them.”

“Behind _them_? Be you who had – ” 

Zayn kicks Louis in the ankle.

“Nick – ”

“That your sugar daddy’s name?”

Zayn lets that interruption go and just thumbs Harry's fingers, like, _you carry on, don’t mind him_. 

“Nick’d sacked him, apparently. He was desperate.” Harry sighs, remembering the blood on James's ruddy face and the things he'd shouted as Nick and Ben hauled him to the lift, indignant threats, nothing original. “Don’t think he really understood that I chose Nick. I chose to let him buy me, I’m not generally just for sale to anyone who wants it and’ll drop a handful of fivers on the ground after.”

“Is _anybody_ following this?” Louis squeezes out from under Zayn’s other arm and goes to put the kettle on, opening the cupboard and muttering at Zayn for keeping his paintbrushes in the mugs.

“I am, I think,” Liam says, frowning and meeting Niall’s eye, suddenly unsure. “We’re just waiting for how he hurt his face, right?” 

“Remember that YouTube video with the 'take them by surprise, stamp, headbutt, knee ‘em' thing?” Harry looks around the room. Someone’s put up new curtains. They’re moderately less offensive than the last lot. “This is what it looks like when you get that out of order. Asked if he wanted ice cream, kneed him, was sort of a mutual headbutt when he folded and I moved in to stamp him. He broke his nose on my face.” 

Niall laughs and tips his head back, while Liam ruffles Harry’s hair. “Atta boy.”

“And where was your sugar daddy?” Louis says. “Too frightened of losing his best asset to intervene?”

Harry thinks about keeping Nick’s part to himself, but they’re all leaning in – even Louis, clutching his box of teabags at the doorframe. 

“He was on the balcony with all the sheets and the crumbs but when he saw, he sort of lost it. Hauled him up, the guy dripping blood like… a… sponge – and I didn’t hear all of it because I was on the floor and kind of dizzy, but it was something about concrete Ugg boots and the bottom of the canal. Was pretty manly, he said, after. He was naked – did I mention that? He got dressed, though, before he went to the kitchen to get me a steak.”

“Made you hungry?” Niall says.

Harry frowns at him. “To put on the bruise, for the swelling. Was a really expensive one.”

Harry pushes his hair up and back, blocking Nick’s panicked concern from the story because he doesn’t want to reduce that in size. 

“What would his mama and papa think, wasting his inheritance on a commoner,” Louis says, going back to his tea. 

“He’s not like that. He has a business empire.”

“That _and_ his own teeth?” Louis says, squeezing the tea bag between two spoons. “You should probably marry him, then.”

*

_“Jesus fucking Christ. When you talk you really talk, don’t you?”_

_That’s what you said to me after I span you an alternate universe version of the night we’d just lived through, one where we flirted our way around Henry’s party until you couldn’t stand me and had me on the buffet table with everyone watching, wet in the knickers and red in the face._

_Don’t remember what I said, exactly, just that I backed you onto the bed and you looked up at me, little bit scared and a lot ignoring it. I left the baby and the darling out of it and wound you up real slow. Think you thought you’d been doing pretty well hiding who you are, until then. Been a while since I did it like that, just words and the friction of someone else’s dick on mine._

_“For dirty talk that was a lot like therapy,” you said._

_And I told you, didn’t I, because I was stupid from coming on your stomach that it’s what I like about sex: it’s like someone giving you the key and saying, “Here you go, decode me.”_

_Now I wonder if it was really yourself you were indulging when you asked me to talk to you. In which fuck did you read that what I needed to feel better that night was to be in charge? And after James, again, how did you know that too much kindness would only make me cry, that the thing there’d be comfort in was you leaving a love bite on the back of my neck?_

_Been under a lot of people’s skin, but no one ever really slipped mine on before and made it feel like it fit._

*

It’s not supposed to become a thing, checking his phone for new titbits of Nick; Harry just does it once and it sticks. It’s odd that Nick’s a real person, with a kettle that gets furry and a dog that throws up, that sometimes he sets his grill on fire making cheese on toast and other times he’s wrapped around a DJ with one of those faces that can’t be anything other than a huge deal to stand next to.

Harry sips the tea Niall made him, thumbing past Zayn’s drunken duck face on Liam’s shoulder to the picture Nick posted at 5am. It’s him in bed with his hair everywhere and a grumpy face, captioned: _anyone know a 24-hour dog manicure service? Her nails are ruining my floor and my beauty sleep_.

And Harry doesn’t mean to be a loser but he sets his mug down on the ironing board and touches Nick’s cheek, moves a crumb off it, and – 

“Oh shit shit shit, I liked his photo.”

“What?”

“Look!” Harry says, turning his phone around. “ _Harry Styles_ – right there under it with a fucking heart. How long has it been doing that when you touch – ?”

“Always, Harry. You do it all the fucking time. Who is – ”

Harry rakes his teeth over his lip. “Can I take it back? How do I take it back, like, before he sees it?” 

“Dunno.”

“Oh, great. Fucking great.”

Niall sits down on the arm of the sofa. “That him? That your Nick? He’s not bad.” When Harry doesn’t answer, he leans towards him, getting right under his face. “You’re looking at pictures of him sleeping, now?”

“I’m – ”

Harry scrambles for the explanation, the thing that will make this seem less tragic and weird. He’d been hoping, when he started this, that it’d help, that he’d discover Nick had found himself a boyfriend – a model so impossibly beautiful he’d be straight up out-classed or the silver-haired cello player who was supposed to be imaginary and hates his dog. At the very least, he’d hoped to discover some gross habit of Nick’s that’d make wanking over him a complete impossibility.

Not that he’s been doing that.

Total anomaly, those three times when he couldn’t sleep and his brain wouldn’t let go of the image of himself on a train, earphones in, licking the tips of his fingers to trace the outline of the Gherkin, the Shard, and the Wheel on the grimy glass as they appeared. Nick was waiting for him on the platform to help him with his bags. “Surprise,” he said, and then there’d been some shagging, against the wall in the station toilets at first, before that turned into Nick on his knees over that trunk in his lounge. Like, what else is that possibly there for? Harry’d had to slide down the bathroom door for a moment after that. 

“It’s been months, Harry,” Niall says, like a doctor breaking bad news. “Probably doesn’t even remember your name.”

The thought stings so much it actually hisses and sends the smell of singeing into the air.

“Seemed like he really liked me.”

“Sure he likes anyone who’ll do what you do in bed.”

Harry’s vision goes a bit grey. God, this is bad. This is really bad. “Was more than – ”

“Should that be doing that?”

“What?”

Niall pokes him and Harry looks down at the ironing board, where the iron is smouldering in the middle of Deep Purple.

“Oh crap.” Harry picks it up, releasing a cloud of steam and smoke, grimacing at the iron-shaped brown patch in the middle of the t-shirt’s chest. Kind of where a person’s heart would be. He stares at it and stares at it until the weight of the iron actually hurts his wrist. “Should I read into this?”

“If you want,” Niall says, getting up with a shrug, patting him on the hip. “Whatever makes you feel better.”

Harry puts the iron down – on the metal bit it’s supposed to sit on this time, and reaches for his phone so he can look up _getting burn marks out of vintage t shirts, how to_.

 _Nicholas Grimshaw_ has left a tiny heart under the last photo Harry posted, some barely in-focus snapshot of his dinner captioned: _looks sick or like sick, you decide_.

*

_“What’s your mum think you’re doing?”_

_Took you until the balcony breakfast picnic shag to ask that. I traded you scrambled eggs for honesty:_

_“Being a silly, stubborn dick, probably.”_

_Like always, you didn’t rush me, just waited while I got it all in order in my head. You have one of those faces it’s easy to tell things to. Even really hard things. Or maybe it wasn't your face, it was the squeeze of your knees around me, having your bracelets to play with, your chest right there behind me if I needed to lean._

_“There’s no tragedy that explains me, if you’re wondering. Was just making a point when I came here – that I could do it on my own, didn’t need my stepdad’s money.” Scrambled egg is nice to squish, way they make it in hotels. “Only I was wrong and I did. She thinks I’m working in a burger van, saving enough to go to uni.”_

_“That what you’ll do with the money I – ”_

_You stopped, went quiet for a moment into juice you later told me was guava. You never get orange. It’s weird._

_“What’s it cost, these days?” you said, stealing a bit of toast you said you didn’t want when I ordered. “Is it enough? Because I could – ”_

_“No.” I said that too fast, probably. “Thank you, though.”_

_Thought you’d push it: “Seriously Harry, I spend more than a year’s tuition on shoes when I’m in the right mood. I’d barely notice it was gone.”_

_Maybe I was hoping for it, but all you said was:_

_“Good look for you, nose in a book. What you want to study?”_

_“Not sure I do anymore,” I said, because once you start with the truth there’s no stopping it. “Back then, I just wanted to get away. Live a bit. Is that irony? That I didn’t make it and I already feel like I’ve lived too much?”_

_“Don’t ask me,” you said. “I dropped out. Couldn’t get my head round macroeconomics. Failed it nine times.”_

_“But you – you run a company.”_

_“Called Plastic Jesus,” you said. “What else would I be other than a giant, stinking fraud?”_

_The knock at the door and the kerfuffle that followed stopped me thinking, at the time, that if you'd done it, no reason I couldn't, but don't think it didn't stick._

*

It’s been the kind of day that starts too early – grainy eyeballs no sleep early – and just gets worse. Harry throws the post, all bills, naturally, onto the bed where Niall’s playing guitar.

“Thought you only needed a few quid more to pay your half?” he says. “They’re going to cut us off. I can’t work without elec– ”

“You’re such a worrywart. It’s an empty threat. They just say that to make you cough up. It’s illegal to turn it off.” 

“I’m looking that up.”

Harry sinks down on the edge of the blankets, digging his phone out of his pocket. The last app he had open refreshes, producing a sunrise.

It’s not a pretty one, nor a dramatic one, but it’s been taken from somewhere outside, high up, with just a hint of net in the corner of it, rising up on the breeze like a ghostly hand.

“What’s it say? How long’ve we got before they start with the debt collectors?”

“Hmnn?” Harry checks three times but yes, the sunrise belongs to _Nicholas Grimshaw_ and the word _morrrrniiiiing_. “Look at this,” he says, and holds it out to Niall. 

Niall glances at it and shrugs. “So what?”

Harry’s already scrolling through his own pictures, finding the one he wants. “It look the same view as this to you?”

He holds it out and Niall rolls his eyes but gives the picture a glance. “Maybe. Why?”

Throat all tight and itchy, Harry stares at the photo he took: _seen better views_. He picks out the landmarks, remembering where they are, looks back at the sunrise to see if they line up. 

“Think he’s here – staying in the room we – ”

Niall shoves his guitar away, crawls over, takes Harry’s face in his hands and makes him look up. “I love you,” he says, “and I know you liked him – ” Niall brings Harry down low enough to kiss. “ – but this is reality. He paid to fuck you. That’s it.” He holds Harry’s face, stroking while Harry nods. “Now, you got any cash? I owe Simon a hundred and I’d rather have British Gas breathing down my neck than him.”

“Need someone to help me do a post run later. I could pay – ”

Niall waves him off and reaches for his hoodie. “You know I’m no good at that. Just go do what I’m best at.”

Harry stares at the door for a long time after it closes behind him. 

“That’s not what you’re best at,” he says to it, but he’s not sure what Niall’s best at, other than being Niall and making him feel like whatever it is, it’s always a lovely night for it.

Or that’s the way it used to be. Now it feels like something has crawled into his stomach and died because Niall will never see that he should have lovely nights, not just pretend the one he’s landed in is, whatever shitty thing it contains. 

Harry scrolls through Nick’s photos, Nick’s life, then his own, the one he built in part because Nick took him to Paris for a lovely night that went all wrong in a way that was exactly right. He’s not sure it’s a good decision, never is when he makes them fast, but he fills the emergency tub with money – £133.78 – and grabs his bag.

*

There are roses dyed green for some occasion Harry’s not aware of where the lilies were when he pushes through the golden door. He’d thought maybe the act of being here would make Nick manifest at the desk, but it’s the woman with the corset-tight bun instead. Traversing the distance does something weird to his legs, like in being aware of the need to do it in public, he’s completely forgotten how to walk. He makes it there eventually and waits until she’s done poking away at the computer and looks up with a lipsticked-on smile.

“Hi – is Nick Grimshaw in?”

“I’m not at liberty to disclose who stays here, I’m afraid.”

Shit. Harry bites his lip.

“Right, how about Ben? He about? Stayed here a while back though – in the Fabulous Suite – and I promised him afternoon tea. He never has much to do during the day, does he?”

She gives him the once over and he must like he could afford to stay, because she reaches for the phone and pulls off her earring. “Could I take your name?”

“Harry Styles.”

After a brief conversation with the handset, she smiles. “He says he’d be delighted to join you in the restaurant.”

 

Harry sits at a table laid out like he imagines the Ritz is, fiddling with a spoon. This is either the best idea he’s ever had, or the flat-out worst. When he left the flat it was definitely the former, but the certainty has dwindled, and now the only thing stopping him from legging it, aside from the leg malfunction thing, is that Ben seems like the type who’d take being stood up to heart. He’s just wondering if he could quash that with a note when Ben puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Well, this is a surprise,” Ben says. He takes Harry in – it’s just jeans, a t-shirt, and a cardigan, but he adds, “You look different.” 

“Nick bought me the jeans. Flatmate says I should stop being sentimental and sell them for as much as I can.”

“Not a bad plan.”

“Not a good one, either. Make my arse look amazing.”

Ben indicates the chair opposite him, and when Harry nods, he sits, flicking the tails of his jacket out. “I took the liberty of ordering Earl Grey and a selection of finger sandwiches,” he says, “to save you the horrible burden of choosing.”

“Aww, you remembered.” Harry puts the spoon back, just off perpendicular to his fork, straightening it so it doesn’t niggle at Ben. “How’s your dog? He still got a crush on that football?”

“Think they actually got married in a private ceremony.”

“Happy ending. Cool.”

By the time Harry’s asked about the other important figures in Ben’s life, the waiter’s brought over a teapot, two dainty cups covered in flowers, and a stand of soldier sandwiches with no crusts on. Ben pours the tea, letting up a fragrant, flowery steam, and plops a sugar cube in his, smiling that placid smile of his that makes Harry feel like he’s six.

“So, this is – ” Harry’s going to say 'nice' but he’s too worried about everything that hasn’t happened yet to really mean it. “Um – oh fuck it, how long’s Nick staying?”

Ben’s eyes twinkle with wry amusement.

“Just a hint?” Harry leans in, wetting his lips. “Like has he left already?” Nothing. No reaction. So he’s still here. “Have I got a week to try and run into him accidentally on purpose or do I definitely have to do it tonight?”

“I’m afraid I can’t disclose – ”

“But if I just came up with you and you left the computer unattended and I happened – ”

“I would never leave a computer displaying privileged information unattended.”

“Professional. Love it.” 

At Harry’s eye roll, Ben laughs, but it dies when Harry sinks back against his chair with a defeated sigh. 

“Might I enquire why you’re so keen to know? I believed you had a – ” Ben eyes the other patrons and lifts an eyebrow. “ – short term contact as his – er – personal assistant? I’m afraid I can’t allow you to use the hotel to – ” 

“No, that’s not – ” 

Harry toys with the sandwich stand, twisting the metal knob on the top.

It comes off.

“Oh – shit – sorry.” He tries to put it back on, but he drops it onto the table, attracting the attention of a grey-haired woman with a hawk nose. “Er – ” He sets it down on its plate, where it rolls, accusatory. He huffs at it. Great. He’s broken the stand and Ben thinks he’s here to boff some more money out of Nick. “I don’t do that anymore. The – personal assisting. Just want to see him because – ” He takes a deep breath and looks Ben square in the eye. “Well, I panicked at the thought he was here. A good kind of panicked. Like the way you do before you get on a ride at the fair.” He chews his lip. Will Ben have ever been to a fair? “You ever think, like, you’ve met someone? Really met someone – only it happens so fast you don’t realise until you’ve spent ages thinking about it? And because you didn’t know at the time, when they said goodbye, you said okay, even though you weren’t sure it was. Are those cucumber?”

Without waiting for an answer, Harry takes a delicate sandwich and shoves it in his mouth. 

“Nick would hate these,” he says. 

He gulps the sandwich down and reaches for another: salmon with some kind of cheese. 

“He has this real thing about sandwiches being too wet,” Harry says, poking at the bread. “He thinks lettuce is the only acceptable salad to have in one, unless you’re having a cob, in which case he will grudgingly accept a tomato as long as he’s going to eat it within half an hour of it being prepared.”

“You’re an expert on his sandwich preferences.”

“His favourite’s turkey and he thinks this pulled pork craze is just bollocks for people too posh to say they want ham.” Too late, Harry realises it was a statement and not a test question. “Erm – ”

Eyes unwavering, Ben takes a sip of his Earl Grey before settling it purposefully on the saucer between them. “Do you recall other details? Say, what his ringtone is?”

“Depends. People he likes get this thing that was big in Ibiza first time he went – kind of goes _urgh uh uh urghhhhhhh_ – it’s not instrumental, those are the actual words.” Ben swallows, and Harry realises that yeah, sex noises don’t really go with afternoon tea. “People he doesn’t like used to get Pitbull but he switched it to this song he said sounds like Giorgio Moroder in a blender because I like it and he thinks he’s funny.” Harry reaches for another sandwich, squashing it between his fingers. “I mean he is funny, so.” 

Ben steeples his fingers in front of his chest, tapping them together in a light bounce. “Mr Grimshaw certainly made an impression. He is one of our more discerning guests.” Ben shifts in, resting his elbows on the table and bringing his fingers into his chin. “His taste is usually impeccable.”

Taking in the conflict on Ben’s brow, Harry leans in. “I could just wait in the lounge upstairs? I wouldn't get in your way. And if he wanted me to leave, I would. Wouldn't cause you - or him - any trouble, not when you were both so nice to me.”

“He won’t be back until late. Creature of habit, you know?” 

Harry waits, frowning.

“You came with him, I recall, when he returned from a bar?” Ben waves like the queen at a crowd. “A bar he likes very much? Where, I believe, they serve a particular favourite, rather obscure, tipple?”

“Oh?” Harry says. Habit, what's he..? Wait. Ben knew what Nick would get for breakfast and his favourite pudding. Nick always stays in the same room in the same hotel and – _shit_. “Oh.” 

Before Ben sees him coming, Harry leans across the table to haul him in by his lapels and kiss him noisily on the mouth. 

“Thanks.” He’s just retreating back to his own seat when a thought occurs. “Er – he doesn’t have another personal assistant, does he?”

Ben shakes his head, dabbing at his lips with his napkin. “On his last four visits, he seemed to have become rather fond of his own company – and vanilla ice cream, with sprinkles, on the balcony.”

*

_“I’ve called you a cab,” you said. “Be downstairs in ten minutes. Ben’ll have someone come help you with your bags, if you ever get done with packing them.”_

_Loitered over folding the jumper that was my favourite, even though I hadn’t worn it yet, the one you said made me look like I should be on the front of a Christmas card._

_You didn’t help and you didn’t watch. You sat at the table with your laptop typing away, clickclickclickclickclicked over me doing up the zip and taking it outside to Ben and him calling up a helper in the lift. You didn’t get up when I said, “That’s that, then.”_

_You didn’t even really look, but as I turned for the door, you said: “ ‘bye, Harry. Thanks.”_

_It was real soft and quiet, like the same way people say ‘but I love you’ when the person they gave everything too just left indefinitely and they’ve nothing but a door to talk to._

_Walked over to where you were sitting. I tilted your head back and kissed you upside down. Probably lasted longer than it should’ve, my nose and your chin. You murmured into it, covered my fingers with yours, made it lovely, I thought._

_“Have a good day, honey,” I said, just before I left._

_Not sure if you could tell, but what I meant was: I don’t quite know it, but I’m already bereft._

*

The bar’s pretty empty. The palm readers have bored faces and are arguing about _Made In Chelsea_. Harry makes a circuit of the room: guys in mid-range suits out on the pull; girl and a guy both talking to opposite walls, first date maybe, met online; couple of Spanish kids gabbing away over the menu, students on an exchange.

Harry takes a seat at the bar and when the guy comes over, Harry orders a whiskey and ginger, with a cherry, and a saffron gin, and is amazed his voice doesn’t come out all squeaky and fourteen. He wants to get his phone out and distract himself with messages or pictures, but if Nick comes in, sees him, and scurries off, he at least wants to know it, so he can stop all this.

He sits there so long his drink goes tepid and his bladder really can’t handle anxiety so he goes for a piss. As he rinses his hands, he wishes he were the kind of person who could give themselves a pep talk in the mirror, but he’s not, so he just messes with his hair a bit and goes back out.

Nick’s standing at the bar, gaze frozen on the drinks. He’s dressed pretty sombrely – for him – black suit and a stripy t-shirt. His hair’s shorter on the sides but longer in the quiff. 

Harry’s cheek twitches at the sight of him and he has no idea how to approach, torn between the impulse to jump on his back and hug him and tap him, all formal and polite.

The barman goes over to ask what he wants, but Nick just keeps staring at the glasses. Something about his expression makes Harry want to run away, do this some other time, or send him a text instead from the comfort of his bedroom, where burying himself in Niall and blankets and crying for the rest of the week isn’t quite so far away. 

“Er – I’ll have a – ” Finally Nick looks up at the barman. “Sorry, it’s like someone’s just walked over my grave. Oh Christ, I’m turning into my nana. Mojito. I’ll have a mojito, make it a strong one, thanks.” He sits down, fiddling with his bracelets, twisting them like Harry’s nerves. “Out of interest, who ordered – ”

“Uh, me.”

Harry clears his throat too late to do anything about the croak in his voice, pushing his hair out of his eyes as Nick turns his head. Nick goes from open-mouthed to hitching half his mouth up into a smile, and then he’s off his seat and Harry’s got a face full of t-shirt and cake shop. He snaps his arms around Nick’s middle and hugs him but before he can tell what it feels like, Nick’s stepping away, looking him over, hands on his arms, them falling away when he frowns, second-guessing his reaction. 

Panicking, and not in a fairground way, Harry blurts:

“I buy t-shirts.” Ok, that’s nonsense. Good start. “Not to wear – um – well obviously I wear some of them, like, if I really like them or if I put a burn mark on their heart, but – ”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Sorry,” Harry says, huffing a nervous laugh, fiddling with the hem of the Deep Purple number that now feels like it’s burning all over, especially the back of his neck. “Started in the wrong place.”

Nick slides back onto his stool, sitting on it the wrong way, feet dangling like a kid. 

_Patient, that’s it. I’d forgotten how patient your face is._

“Vintage band t-shirts and designer ones, those are the ones I buy.” Harry wishes he had his drink to cling to. He looks at the ceiling, tracing the drapes of the fabric, wondering how they keep it up, if there’s some kind of invisible staple they use for that. “Find them in charity shops, flea markets, house clearance sales. I wash them, iron them, take a picture of me in them, and sell them on my website. Got these, like, stickers and tape with the brand name on and I wrap them kind of nicely, because some of the rare tour ones are really valuable. And even if they’re not, it’s nice when you get something in the post that looks like a gift. People like it. Keep coming back or asking if I can get something specific, anyway.” He glances back with his heart going crazy and Nick’s watching him like he’s holding his own pulse steady in his wrist with his fingers. “Building up my stock so I can get a pop-up shop – there’s this shipping container thing in Shoreditch – low overheads, right crowd. Thought I’d try it a couple of times and if it goes well, move. Move to London, like I always wanted. I’ve a moderately good feeling about it, as a plan.”

“That’s like doing fucking cartwheels for you, innit.”

Harry makes an offended face and swats him on the knee. “Guess what it’s called, my website.”

“Knowing you it’ll be some horrible pun.” Nick waits for a good minute before realising that no, he’s really supposed to be guessing. “T Time? No, it’ll be – something with style and Styles. Stylesish? That’s crap, forget I – ” Nick looks at him, direct, like he can read in on his eyeballs. “Vintage Styles Never Goes Out of Fashion.”

Harry does a little dance. 

“Wait, not – not really? Did I get it?” His voice goes up an octave as Harry nods, beams at him, tongue caught between his teeth. “Wait ‘til Henry hears, he’ll come in his pants.” 

Quiet follows and Harry’s heart pounds, because what if that was everything they had left to say to each other? 

Just as he’s thinking it, Nick catches a snicket of Harry’s t-shirt between his finger and his thumb, making Ritchie Blackmore’s face go weird as he tugs him in a bit closer. “This one of your collection?”

“Burnt it, and I felt bad for it.”

“Looks good.” Nick’s mojito arrives and he gestures at the bar. “You want – ”

“I’m good and – I’ll get it?” 

He hands over a tenner from his wallet and sinks onto the seat he vacated to go to the loo, poking at the cherry in his drink. It bobs like his stomach when Nick looks at him; he remembers this is what it’s like when you like someone, when you’re not watching everything they’re doing for clues. You feel. You feel your hope, your reactions, and your insecurities nudging you into a free fall inside yourself. He swallows a mouthful of whiskey and ginger. That’s what people do, right? 

“You here for long? Not, like, in the bar. Manchester.”

“Couple of days. Me and Annie started a new record label –” Nick’s smile comes easy and he pushes up his hair. Did he always do it the same way Harry does, with his wrist? “ – and it’s doing well enough her and Aimee didn’t have to sell Mac No Cheese. Here to sign a couple of bands – we have these meetings where we talk profit margins for ten minutes and then sit on the floor and play each other stuff.” 

“Probably should’ve called it Side-tracked.”

“Who says we didn’t?”

Harry looks over, eyes only, like _how gullible do you think I am?_

Nick turns a smile into abandoning his mojito and reaching for the saffron gin. 

“Should say thank you,” he says. “You gave me the idea. Reminded me why I started doing all this, that once upon a time I'd take a bottle of WKD to the face just to play people the music I love. Been good, real good, getting back to it.”

As he sets the glass down, Harry can’t stop staring at his mouth. He’s jealous of ice cubes, now, apparently. Great. “Ben said you’d been up a few times.” He takes a fortifying sip of whiskey, missing his lips with the liquid, setting it down and hoping Nick didn’t notice. “You could’ve texted and – ”

“How could I have?” 

It’s so quiet Harry barely hears it. 

“You delete my number?”

“You know that’s not what I meant.” Nick wraps his fingers around his glass. “Would've been presumptuous. And even if I _had_ , anything I offered would've had to be ordinary, otherwise I'd've always wondered – ”

“ – is it just the money he fancies?" Harry's impression of Nick is still flawless enough to make Nick smile. "Does he like me, or is it just my credit card's sparkling personality?” Dropping back to his own tone, he adds, "I like ordinary."

“So you'd have fallen for, ‘Hey Harry, fancy a trip to the pictures, a shag, and a boatload of wittering? Net value twenty quid’?” 

“I happen to put a very high value on your wittering,” Harry says, keeping his voice low, like they're in bed, “and I do have sex just because I want to, you know. Not always calculating the bottom line.” 

“I didn’t know you’d had a change of career, did I.”

“Well you would’ve, if you’d texted,” Harry says, poking him in the ribs, “or stalked my photos properly.”

“Seem to recall you had a policy designed to stop people getting weird and attached. If I’d known it was ‘no kissing but using my selfies as your lock screen’s cool,’ I’d have – ” Nick clamps shut on whatever he was going to say and shakes his head. “And phones work both ways.” 

Harry wets his lips because yeah, there's that. He fits his fingers to Nick's leg, squeezes. “Can I show you something?” 

He reaches for the bag he abandoned at the foot of the bar. From within it, he extracts the tan leather notebook and places it on the bar. 

“I'm writing about you,” Harry says, digging his nail in halfway down the pages. “From here to the end, it’s all you, pretty much.”

“We only knew each other for a week.”

“No we didn’t, not really.” Harry looks at the bar, wishing for a mouthful, a throatful, a bellyful of whiskey. “A lot happened real fast, didn't it? It takes a while to, like, process? You have to understand it in little pieces, in records and drinks and random words. Or I do, at least.”

“What're you saying?”

“I'm saying – ” Harry rubs his hands on his knees. Shit, they've gone dry. Aren't they supposed to go damp? “I never met anyone before.”

With a sharp look up, Nick meets his eye.

“Not like we met,” Harry says. “It’s like we stopped everything we were doing, long enough to say hi to all these bits of each other, but – ” He swallows, losing the thread of what he’s saying in the way Nick’s eying him, tentatively hopeful as if he daren’t do anything in case he makes this disappear. “For fuck’s sake, I want to go to the pictures and shag and see what happens, Nick. What's it going to cost me?”

The look on Nick's face – eyebrow high and startled – suggests those are not the words he was expecting. 

Harry pulls a page out of his book and fishes in his bag for a pen. He smacks them down on the bar next to Nick's hand. “You can write it, if that's – ” 

With a cautious glance at Harry, Nick takes the paper and pen, arm brushing Harry’s and making all his hairs bristle, like they’re whispering. He stares at the page full of scribble for ages. Clinging to the biro’s ridges, he drags the nib across the paper. He folds it and slides it across the bar. 

Heartbeat at the end of his fingertips and behind his bellybutton all, Harry takes the paper and opens it.

“If you can’t quite afford it, we can do it in instalments,” Nick says, voice only wavering slightly. “Start small. Would’ve drawn just the pointy v bit but you wouldn’t’ve known what that was and I didn’t want to draw just the top because that’d look like a bum. And – you’ve got a really nice one but – ”

“Hefty.”

“Yeah, it is a bit, but that's what I'm after.”

Nick blinks, takes the paper from Harry's fingers. Harry thinks he's going to draw a line through his offer, feels a whine in the shape of his name form in the base of his throat but then he realises Nick's not revising his price, shit, he’s reading. 

“Hey, don’t, it’s just – word doodles.” He fumbles for the page, trying to take it, but Nick leans back, planting a hand in the middle of his chest. “It’s stupid – probably doesn’t even make – ”

“Did you really wear one of my jumpers all week because you wanted my smell to seep into your skin?”

Oh goddddddddd.

When Harry remembers the furnace that is his face right now, it’s going to glow doubly hot. “And ‘cos it looked nice?”

“ 'Course it did if you were in it.” Nick's cheek divots as he smiles, puts the paper down, and slides it back, certainty falling away with his hand from Harry's chest. “Am I asking for too much? It's what I'm offering and all, so we're clear.”

A biro heart sits caught under Nick's finger, scrawled atop Harry's words. 

It’s the longest three breaths anyone has ever taken before Harry can get out:

“No, no I think I can stretch to that. Call the jumper and the gin downpayments, shall we?”

Nick’s laugh is a breathy cackle that takes over his whole body; Harry catches his hand, pressing his knuckles into his palm, trapping the heart beneath them both on the bar. Nick’s bracelets clink on the surface as he slides his other hand in to join the pile, scuffing over Harry’s fingers, earnest and hard. He slumps into Harry’s arm.

“There's probably a late showing at the Cornerhouse. You pay for the tickets, I'll get the popcorn? What we seeing?”

“Don't care,” Harry says, “as long as it's really, really short.”

*

_You ever meet someone in a bar? Not flirt, not persuade them to fuck, really meet someone?_

_I met you in a bar, once._

_Actually, more than once._

_“You going to eat that cherry before we go, porn star?” you said._

_At the nod of my head, you fished it out of my glass, watched me roll it on my tongue and push it into my cheek._

_“People really fall for that?”_

_“People? No,” I said. “But you did.”_

_“Pest,” you said, and pushed at my head, but still, you were smiling._

_Neither of us said it, “Let’s not stop, yeah? Let’s turn each other inside out until there’s nothing left unknown, then start again.”_

_Instead, you kissed me. You savoured it, took it slow and sweet like all the ones we didn’t do before Paris were in it. Then you swiped the cherry right out of my mouth, real pleased with yourself when you grinned with it caught between your teeth._

_I didn’t know it, not quite then, but it was your clumsy love smile._

_You’ve been wearing it, on and off, ever since._


End file.
